Pretty sure the people running these businesses are targeting a wide variety of different demographics. The article fails to provide any context as to why pretending to be a black influencer is special.
> While we also found Native American, Hispanic, and white women characters, the most viewed and engaged-with AI-generated characters found by The Verge are Black women.
Over here in Europe I see exactly zero of these ads with black people in them, but I see a plenty of these ads.
I'm not 100% sure but I think ad transparency was enforced in Europe after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
According to the byline, the author of this article is a person named Nicole Froio. According to her personal website: https://nicolefroio.com/about-nicole/ and MuckRack page https://muckrack.com/nicole-froio/articles , she is a Colombian-Brazilian journalist who describes herself as an "anarcho-feminist", has multiple academic degrees in humanities fields with some kind of intersectional feminist bent, and has written for various progressive publications in her career.
In other words, she is exactly the kind of person I would expect to find it personally morally and politically important to buy products from actual black creators, and so to find scams about black creators being personally meaningful, and worth specifically writing about.