YouTuber Elliot Choy posted a screenshot on 23 September of a Kalshi advertisement that, as he described it, is his own video with the person in it replaced. “i guess kalshi saw this and thought they should steal my video, turn me into a white dude, and run it as an ad,” he wrote on X, alongside the ad and a link to the original video. The two are near-identical apart from the face: same footage, different man.
The Verge’s Stevie Bonifield reported the exchange on 24 September, including that NPR’s Bobby Allyn confirmed the ad is real. A Kalshi representative told Allyn the ad is old and that the company no longer uses AI-generated ads. That is a confirmation and a timeline in one sentence — the ad existed and it ran — and it leaves everything else open: how many ads were made this way, when they stopped, and where the source footage came from.
The product being sold is the testimonial
The mechanism is not complicated, and that is what makes it useful to look at directly. Existing video of a real person is fed through generative tools, the on-camera identity is swapped, and the result is placed as paid promotion for a wagering product. What the viewer receives is someone who appears to be an ordinary person describing an ordinary experience with the platform. Nobody in the ad is a customer, and no win shown in it was ever wagered.
That is the entire value of the format for the advertiser. Gambling advertising works on the credibility of other people’s luck — the account of a normal person who signed up and did well — which is also why regulators in other markets have spent years on testimonial rules. Synthetic media removes the last constraint on producing that account at volume, and removes the person whose face it uses from the transaction entirely.
This is the second such campaign documented in the prediction-market sector this year. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported that Polymarket paid dozens of social media users to film themselves placing fake bets on copies of the Polymarket website rather than on the live product. The fabricated testimonial is not an edge case in this category; it is a mode the sector has already used at scale.
What Choy can do about it
Choy’s practical remedy was a public post. Likeness and publicity rights vary by state, pursuing an operator over a single ad creative is not worth a creator’s time, and the platforms that ran the ad treat the campaign as a client’s asset. The asymmetry is the same one that runs through the rest of this beat: the operator can generate promotional material faster than any individual can object to it, and the money at stake is a rounding error to a company valued in the tens of billions.
The ad lands in the middle of the sector’s heaviest spending push. Kalshi and Polymarket have both bought the 2026 NFL season with celebrity work — Polymarket’s LeBron James commercial, Novig’s Sydney Sweeney video, Kalshi’s campaigns with Lionel Messi, Luka Modrić and Timothée Chalamet. The AI spot is the cheap end of the same strategy: instead of paying a famous person for their face, take a stranger’s video and manufacture a face for it. Kalshi’s statement to NPR that it no longer uses AI-generated ads is worth keeping on the record, because it is the only public accounting of the practice anyone has offered.