AI Videos Are Flooding TikTok Shop
July 15, 2026
AI-generated product demonstrations, makeup applications and dress twirls are spreading on TikTok Shop, raising tensions among creators, brands and the platform itself.
TikTok provides artificial-intelligence tools for sellers on Shop, a multibillion-dollar marketplace where the company and creators get a cut of each sale they drive, as a way to further boost business. But using the technology this way both undermines consumer trust in an increasingly important sales channel, according to critics, and competes with users who demonstrate products the old-fashioned way.
“I create ads for products that I have in person—real reviews, showing the actual product,” said Rosemarie Soma, a so-called affiliate creator who promotes products on TikTok in exchange for commissions and aired her AI grievances in a video this spring. “It’s very frustrating for affiliates because these [AI] videos are getting ad spend and are making sales.”
Home and beauty appliance maker SharkNinja has issued a warning against the tech.
“TikTok Shop recently launched a new feature called the AI Video Maker, which allows creators to auto-generate shoppable videos using AI. We wanted to get ahead of this quickly: this tool is not permitted under our affiliate program’s No AI-Generated Content policy,” read a memo, obtained by The Wall Street Journal, that SharkNinja sent to members of its affiliate community.
“Please note: affiliates who use AI-generated content to promote our products will have their commissions removed,” the memo read.
As the SharkNinja team focused more heavily on TikTok Shop over the past 18 months, they began to see more potentially misleading AI content show up, said Chief Commercial Officer Neil Shah, who described the memo as a proactive move.
“We didn’t want an AI-generated Shark vacuum cleaning an AI-generated floor,” Shah said. “We want real consumers seeing real products being used by real people.”
The total value of products sold on TikTok Shop in the U.S. this year is expected to rise 48% to $23.41 billion, surpassing e-commerce sales from more established retailers like Target and Costco, according to research firm eMarketer. U.S. advertisers will shell out $13.8 billion in commissions to affiliate sellers across platforms this year, up 11.3%, nearly twice the growth rate of e-commerce spending overall, eMarketer estimates.
Selling on TikTok Shop has meanwhile become a widespread side hustle or even full-time job for people promoting everything from clothing and jewelry to “viral” products like vibration plates that supposedly help with weight loss, said Becky Owen, chief marketing officer at social media and creator agency Billion Dollar Boy.
“It’s launched almost this whole new economy,” Owen said. “If you do affiliate right and you get the right product at the right time, you can become an overnight millionaire.”
The ranks of creators who made sales through TikTok Shop’s global affiliate program have grown to approximately 11.3 million so far this year, including 945,000 in the U.S. alone, from 2.3 million in 2024, according to e-commerce data company Charm.io.
TikTok policies allow creators to earn commissions from entirely AI-generated content as long as they activate an on-screen tag disclosing the technology’s use and don’t include false or misleading claims about the products they promote. Clothes from fast-fashion brand Cider, for example, appear on models in TikTok videos with the tag, “creator labeled as AI-generated.”
Creators now can simply turn still images into three-dimensional videos where their avatars appear to hold or sample products, said Daria Simhony, another affiliate creator.
To earn more money after giving birth to her son last year, Simhony said she transferred the AI techniques she had learned from creating accounts on adult site OnlyFans and Fanvue, a platform for AI-generated personalities, to affiliate marketing.
Simhony creates at least one fully AI-generated promotional TikTok post every day, often taking advantage of brief periods when her son is napping, she said. Her business consists of a mix of affiliate content, where she earns a share of sales by commission, and fixed-fee deals with brands that reach out to her, Simhony said. She also teaches others how to boost earnings with their own AI avatars.
AI allows Simhony to quickly create a range of characters and content for clients such as Korean cosmetics brand Jumiso as well as startups promoting the same kinds of AI tools she uses, she said.
“I can create whoever you need me to,” said Simhony.
Much of the responsibility for managing AI content sits with brands themselves, according to Lauren Lyster, vice president and head of social media at marketing agency Go Fish Digital.
Marketers can choose to use TikTok Shop’s open affiliate plan, where any creator can earn commissions for promoting their products, or a targeted option that requires them to manually choose the creators they work with, Lyster said. They can assert some additional control over the creator approval process, and they can disable a feature in the platform’s campaign management system that automatically turns the highest-performing posts into paid ads, but there’s no way for them to entirely stop the creation of AI posts on their behalf, she said. More manual oversight also means less speed and potential reach.
“If you open up the floodgates, you maybe need to be a bit more risk-tolerant, but you’re going to get a lot more scale,” Lyster said.
Brands that don’t directly review TikTok Shop affiliate content may also be unaware of how they’re showing up.
One creator recently posted affiliate-marketing videos that depicted her AI twin using products from Rare Beauty, the cosmetics brand founded by actress and pop star Selena Gomez. Any sales that resulted would have been eligible for commissions.
The posts have no direct connection to Rare Beauty, according to a spokeswoman, who said the brand doesn’t work with AI-generated creators or duplicates. Rare Beauty is, however, part of TikTok’s open affiliate plan.
The creator, who also promotes an ebook with tips on using AI twins in TikTok Shop, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
SharkNinja understands it has limited power to regulate AI-generated content on TikTok Shop, according to Shah, its CCO.
“Our only ask is, use the real product,” he said.