With the Twitch streamer Marcel “MontanaBlack” Eris is being advertised for a perfume, although he knows nothing about it. The YouTuber Klengan took a closer look at the advertisement in a video.
What kind of advertisement is this? It is an advertisement for a shop that sells fragrance twins. It imitates expensive scents from well-known large brands and sells them at a lower price.
The company has been advertising on platforms like Reddit for some time, and it seems that the Twitch streamer MontanaBlack is recommending the perfume and promoting it. In a clip, he allegedly raves about the scent Imperial: “I just sprayed myself and the [scent] lasts for two or three days.” (via YouTube).
After that, the Twitch streamer names the perfume and continues: “This is the best scent I’ve ever smelled.”
MontanaBlack is not the only one affected
What’s behind this? The advertisement apparently originated without the Twitch streamer’s knowledge and is not real. He is not actually promoting the perfume, and his voice in the second part of the video, when he mentions the name of the perfume, seems to be AI-generated.
As YouTuber Klengan uncovered, the clip of MontanaBlack used for the advertisement is several years old, and the Twitch streamer originally talks about a completely different perfume, namely Ombre Nomade by Louis Vuitton. This can also be seen in this TikTok:
The perfume influencer Jeremy Fragrance is also being used for this advertisement, as Klengan shows in his video (on YouTube). However, in this case, the video itself has also been manipulated, and not just the voice imitated, as with the clip of MontanaBlack. The excerpt from Jeremy Fragrance originally comes from an interview with the magazine VICE, as Klengan shows.
The large reach that influencers have built up during their careers is often used by companies for advertising and collaborations. When this is done in consultation with the respective content creator, it is called a collaboration.
Simply imitating the face or voice of an internet star and staging it for one’s own purposes seems, at least morally questionable.
Klengan elaborates in his video that there is not really an effective way to combat such AI-generated content. While you can have the content blocked if you become aware of it, by then a corresponding damage may have already occurred.
Ultimately, the respective platforms need time to review the content and then delete it if necessary. In the meantime, the video may have already been viewed by many.
How powerless one is in the long run against such actions is also demonstrated by the fact that the advertisements were already spread a year ago, as can be seen on TikTok.
MontanaBlack himself has not yet commented on the advertisement. The fact that the Twitch streamer is making advertisements as an AI-generated version is not far from reality. In the past, a fake MontanaBlack advertised new varieties of his beverage brand GÖNRGY, showing that the Twitch streamer could already retire if he wanted. You can read more about this on MeinMMO: A supermarket advertises with a double of MontanaBlack – Shows that the Twitch streamer could retire
