The people in this ad don't exist. The course they're selling does.

Here’s what happened.

An advert shared by marketer Aazar Shad introduces characters who explicitly say they are AI-generated. Their dialogue runs through familiar giveaways: fingers, hair, reflections and movement. The demonstration ends by promoting AI Video Bootcamp. Shad credits @promptedbyriley with the video. The course website sells training in AI images, video and advertising, including ways to earn money from the results. The sales pitch completes a neat circle: synthetic people demonstrate their usefulness, then invite real people to learn how to produce them.

Source: Aazar Shad · Watch the shared advert, 23 September 2026 ↗

The We Are So Done take

We have reached a lovely stage of professional development: people who don't exist are explaining how we can stay employable.

And, annoyingly, we can see the appeal. We'd love to film an idea we could never otherwise afford, try three versions of a scene and discover that the stupid version was actually the good one. Give us that freedom and we will absolutely use it. We have several stupid versions ready.

We can imagine the sensible meeting already. Generate the presenter for this small job. Use the savings to try another idea. Learn the workflow so we can offer it to clients. Every decision has a perfectly reasonable explanation. Eventually, somebody asks why the next project needs a person in front of the camera at all.

Fortunately, we will have moved into the valuable human work of deciding what the synthetic person should do. We intend to remain essential there for as long as the software finds that arrangement convenient.

We would like to object. First, could someone send us the tutorial?

Outside this newsroom

The internet has thoughts.

The replies include both enthusiasm and objections. On Shad's LinkedIn repost, Emilia Korczynska points to a necklace passing through hair; Wendy Cole argues that human taste and ideas still confer an advantage. These are individual reactions to the advert.

Read the discussion ↗

Selected public reactions, checked 2026-09-25. Individual experiences, not a representative survey.

For those of us already clicking

What we can verify

Access: AI Video Bootcamp offers paid training covering generation, character consistency, sound and editing. Its curriculum names several tools, including Kling and Runway.
Start here: Watch the shared advert or read its transcript in the sources below. The course's curriculum lists tools it teaches; it does not identify which tools made this particular advert.
The small print: We haven't verified which tools made this particular advert, its production cost, the number of attempts or how much human work it required. We haven't tested the course or established the advert's sales performance. This is a source review of a promotional example.

Follow the evidence.

Source-based reporting. No independent hands-on test by this newsroom.
Sources checked 2026-09-25 · Editorial updated 2026-09-25