Snake oil. Now in its 2nd century!
Avatar: Instagram
Headline: New York Times, 3/9/2026
Melanskia is not your typical Amish woman. She boasts more than 300,000 followers on Instagram and warns them about the perils of store-bought foods. She touts the benefits of removing “industrial waste” from the liver with a drink mix her followers can buy on Amazon.
With her modest white hair-covering and wire-rim spectacles, Melanskia is earnest, charming and quite convincing.
She is also not real. She is one of a handful of synthetic influencers created with artificial intelligence who are promoting an untested dietary supplement, Modern Antidote, which sells for just under $50 a jar. There is no disclosure on her account that everything about her is A.I.-generated.
Behind Melanskia is a genuine human being, Josemaria Silvestrini, who is part of a growing vanguard of entrepreneurs taking advantage of rapid advances in A.I. to promote their brands using people who don’t actually exist.
Not fake: Josemaria Silvestrini
According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of 'snake oil', as in any of various substances or mixtures sold (as by a traveling medicine show) as medicine usually without regard to their medical worth or properties, occurred in 1917.
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