YouTuber says Kalshi copied his video and used AI to change his race for an ad

YouTuber Elliot Choy says the prediction-market company Kalshi took one of his videos, recreated it almost shot for shot, used AI to replace him with a white man and ran the result as an advertisement. Choy, who makes videos about apartment hunting in New York, found the ad on 23 September, a year after posting the original apartment-tour clip, and put the two versions side by side on X.

NPR's Bobby Allyn confirmed the ad was real. A Kalshi spokesperson told him the ad was about four months old, that the company no longer runs AI-generated ads depicting people, and that it is reviewing its relationship with the agency that made it. Kalshi has not named that agency, and its statement did not include an apology to Choy or any mention of paying him for the video.

It is not the first time. In June, creator Pushpek Sidhu said Kalshi had recreated one of his videos nearly word for word to promote the platform, without payment or credit, and in that ad too he was swapped on screen for a white man. Startup Fortune notes that the ad industry's self-regulatory body, the National Advertising Division, had already referred Kalshi to the FTC after the company did not take part in an inquiry into its influencer marketing.

The episode lands while Kalshi is under scrutiny elsewhere. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is reviewing nearly a million trades on Kalshi's ether perpetual futures market, a large share of them at an identical $5,500 size. Kalshi says no formal investigation has been opened and attributes the pattern to its own liquidity incentives for market makers.

The outlet says existing law already covers much of this: copying a video without a licence is a copyright question, and using a person's likeness, even an altered one built from their footage, to sell a product without consent can breach right-of-publicity laws in many US states. What AI changes is the cost and speed of doing it. Choy has not said whether he will take legal action, and the ad has already run.