The incident: Multiple Supor e-commerce accounts, including its personal care flagship store, began publishing AI-generated short videos in late July. The content featured absurd scenarios — a woman bathing while a man enters to "help scrub her back" — with suggestive dialogue. The videos were clearly machine-generated: faces had the characteristic smooth, plastic-like texture of AI video, and the scenarios were too bizarre to be live-action. But the brand's logo was prominently displayed, and the videos were published on official channels.
The scale of the problem: This was not an isolated incident. According to industry reports, more than ten major Chinese brands faced AI-ad-related public backlash in the first half of 2026 alone. The three most common types of problematic AI ad content are: (1) vulgar or sexually suggestive imagery, (2) distorted or unrealistic product representations, and (3) outright false claims presented as fact.
Why it happens: The root cause lies in the economics of AI-generated marketing. AI tools can produce a video advertisement for as little as a few yuan (less than a dollar), and companies are increasingly automating the entire production pipeline — from generation to publishing to optimization — with minimal or no human oversight. Industry insiders say it is standard practice to skip human review for low-cost AI ads because the review itself would cost more than the ad production. The AI marketing technology market in China reached approximately 49 billion yuan in 2025 and is projected to exceed 70 billion yuan in 2026.
The consequences: Supor's stock dropped 3.00%, 2.13%, 1.36%, and 1.33% on consecutive trading days from July 31 to August 5. The company's market cap fell from 34.87 billion yuan to 32.86 billion yuan — a loss of roughly 2 billion yuan (about $280 million). Supor removed all offending videos and promised to strengthen its review mechanisms, but the reputational damage may be longer-lasting.
Broader implications: The Supor case illustrates a fundamental tension in the age of generative AI: the same technology that democratizes content creation and slashes marketing costs also makes it dangerously easy to produce harmful or misleading content at scale. The incident underscores the urgent need for companies to maintain human-in-the-loop review processes, especially for brand-facing content, and for regulators to develop clearer guidelines on AI-generated advertising content.