Valeriia Litvinova Cunningham and her family fled escalating conflict in Ukraine to rebuild their lives in North Carolina, only to find themselves battling generative artificial intelligence clones that borrow real human identities to monetize digital trust on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Building Strength Without Labels in North Carolina
Cunningham was pursuing her master’s degree at North Carolina State University when the war escalated. She helped her parents and her sister Anya start over with barely any belongings. Once reunited, the family turned to strength training as an escape and a way to bond.
Anya, who has Down Syndrome, quickly became an inspiration to their growing online community.
“We started strength training together as a way to distract ourselves from what was going on and also do something together as a family,” Cunningham told WRAL Investigates.
They can work out alongside everybody else, and that’s what’s important.
The Rise of the Fake Influencer on TikTok and Instagram
As the family’s follower count expanded, skepticism arrived alongside genuine support. “People are accusing Anya [of] not being real, because nowadays, apparently, now we have to fight with artificial intelligence, and that is exactly why people now struggle with distinguishing between what’s real and what’s not,” Cunningham said.
WRAL Investigates met Anya in person during a workout class. However, reporters also uncovered an account under the handle @MiaTriso21 on both TikTok and Instagram that some people online believe modeled its face after Anya to put on other creators’ bodies.
Laeeq Khan, director of the social media analytics research lab at Ohio University, explained the mechanics behind these deceptive operations. “These accounts borrow a real creator’s body, voice, and audience trust, put an AI face on top and then monetize that trust,” Khan said to WRAL Investigates.
Fighting back against these digital duplicates proved exhausting for Cunningham. “Sometimes, I would get a response saying that something that’s AI-generated is not, so the reports would claim that, ‘We didn’t find this content to be AI-generated,’ and then I have to fight back. I can’t believe that I’m spending so much of my time trying to fight a robot,” she noted.
Platform Moderation Gaps and the C2PA Verification Challenge
Both TikTok and Meta maintain official policies requiring labels on synthetic media and prohibiting content that violates community standards. Meta did not respond to repeated inquiries regarding how they detect profiles slipping through automated moderation filters.
TikTok stated that it employs C2PA Content Credentials technology to track digital origin and edit histories, alongside testing detection systems designed to target accounts dedicated to posting automated spam.
Following inquiries by journalists, the @MiaTriso21 profile was removed from both platforms. Despite the takedown, other versions of the same account are already floating around. If something looks perfect, Khan warns, be skeptical. And if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
