A Deepfake AI Influencer Stole My Wedding Photos

As a full-time content creator, Kelly Stranick (@kellygracemae) knows that one risk of sharing your life online is that, occasionally, other people will try to steal your photos. What she didn’t realize is that, sometimes, those people aren’t real people at all. Below, the Brooklyn-based influencer shares, in her own words, what happened when she discovered a deepfake AI-generated Instagram account was trying to pass off her wedding as their own.

In March 2019, I moved to San Francisco for a job in tech and lived with three boys who told me I had to get on Hinge. “This is just how people meet,” they said. “This is the way the world works now.” I told them, fine, I’d do it, and matched with this guy Andy and went on a date. I was freshly 24 and had no plans of meeting my husband—but one thing let to another, and that’s how it shook out. May 2019: my first and only Hinge date.

In 2022, I thought we’d get engaged, but I figured it would be in the summer. When Andy proposed on March 4, 2022, he caught me completely off guard; I was wearing leggings and no makeup, though thankfully I had my hair blown out. I’m not one of those girls who grew up thinking about their wedding. I didn’t even think I would get married. I come from a divorced family, and I had a lot of trauma with past relationships, so I didn’t give much thought to having a wedding one day. So when we did get engaged, we hired a full-service wedding planner, Veronica Joy Events, who’s also a family friend. I gave her a Pinterest board of ideas and said, “I want colorful flowers and disco balls. I want it to feel like a rager,” and let her take it from there.

I’d started making TikToks in the spring of 2022, a few months after we got engaged. It was just for fun—I didn’t really have an audience until the beginning of 2023—and I was getting comfortable being more personal online, including talking about what was going on in my life, which at the time was wedding planning. I was sharing about the wedding process and talking about the decisions we made that felt authentic to us, like not having a first dance or a bridal party. But I wouldn’t say my content was wedding-specific or anything.

When it came to our actual wedding day, I was one of those people who thought, I have no expectations of this being the best day of my life. My priority was to be calm, present, enjoy the day, and not be inundated by stress. I had time by myself the morning of; I didn’t have a big group of people getting ready with me. I wanted it to be very chill. But because I didn’t have those expectations, it actually did end up being the best day of my life. I was able to enjoy everything from start to finish, because I had set those intentions. I was floating. If I could be my best self, like I was on that day, every day, I would be unstoppable.

I was definitely excited to share about the wedding after the fact—to give perspective and advice—but I was shocked at how much people wanted to know. I shared about our vendors and talked a lot about the mindset I had around our wedding—though, the thing that got the most attention was the fact that we skedaddled from the wedding and went to the Brooklyn Mirage for our after-party.

Then recently, I got an Instagram message from one of my followers. She was like, “Hey, I was just scrolling, and I saw this video. This is your wedding photo.” In the video, there was a photo of my wedding, my husband, Andy, everything—but it wasn’t my face. This other influencer had replaced my face with hers, and she was talking about little things that she did at her wedding. None of it was even remotely related to me, other than the fact that she’d used my photo as the intro to her video. My immediate reaction was, What the hell? Who is this person taking my wedding photo, putting their face on it, and making content about it?

It didn’t even register to me that it could be AI. Obviously, people use AI to Photoshop, but I didn’t realize that the person in the video was AI, until I posted about the ordeal. Then I started getting a lot of messages from people saying, “This is a deepfake. This is not even a real person.”

A screenshot from the video in question.

I never shared this part online, but something similar happened to me a little less than six months after our wedding. One of my followers alerted me that a girl on RedNote had taken that exact same photo and expertly Photoshopped their face onto my body. So it didn’t even register to me that this new person wasn’t real—until people messaged me that the account was a deepfake. I still don’t know if it’s a fully AI-generated person or if they’re using someone’s voice and likeness to generate these videos. I also didn’t realize until recently that the whole intention behind the deepfake account, which has over 60,000 followers, is to sell and promote an app that generates photos to look like they came from a disposable camera.

This situation definitely brought up a lot of thoughts for me. Since I’m not actually in the video, I feel less connected, but I have seen people like Arielle Lorre, who’s a content creator and podcaster, who had her face and voice used by a company to create an AI-generated paid ad where she was “talking” about their product. If that were me, I would be so heated. I would feel so confused, scared, and pissed off. I would try to take legal action.

In my case, I’m not sure how I feel about it being a completely fake, AI-generated person. I feel like that’s less harmful, but also some people don’t know if it’s real or not. And it is harmful to content creators who have to share things on the internet, and who are then exposing themselves to the risk of someone manipulating that audio or video and using it to promote products that they’ve never spoken about. I also feel icky that my mom scrolls on Instagram Reels sometimes, and a lot of our parents and our grandparents can’t always differentiate what is an authentic human testimony versus what is AI-generated. It preys on the vulnerability of people who aren’t able to tell the difference. In general, we just need to be aware of the content that we’re consuming and really looking at things through the lens of, “Is this real or is this not?”

The one thing this experience really confirmed for me is that when I bring kids into this world, I want to make an active effort to not share them online or in any way compromise their safety. Anyone who puts anything on the internet is at risk—it doesn’t matter if you’re an influencer with a following or just someone who has a video of them somewhere online.

Honestly, to me, this is all just a funny story. It’s bizarre that it’s not a real person. I didn’t even know AI influencers were a thing, but I think they’re going to become more common, because a brand doesn’t have to pay a fake influencer. Really, I just can’t believe they kept Andy in the video and not me. It’s so rude.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Madison Feller

Digital Deputy Editor

Madison is the Digital Deputy Editor at ELLE.com, where she also covers news, politics, and culture. If she’s not online, she’s probably napping or trying not to fall while rock climbing.