• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Immediately after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to automate all ad creation by 2026, Instagram began testing auto-generated shopping tags identifying the product featured in a post, leading to the introduction of “Shop the Look.”

Now, creators feel deceived by the platform and AI. 

“Shop the Look” is an AI-powered shopping test that invites users to shop creator-made Instagram posts by automatically prompting them to buy items showcased in the videos or images via a “Shop the Look” button.

Meta’s algorithms then use the product to recommend more shoppable products to the user.

However, as Bloomberg originally reported, clicking on the button often recommends low-quality versions of the products featured in a creator’s video, ultimately linking what a creator carefully curates to products they’ve never seen or do not endorse.

“My followers were being shown cheap knockoffs and random items from brands I’ve never heard of, attached to my image, under my name,” a popular creator named Julia Berolzheimer wrote in a Substack post.

Berolzheimer, who has over 1 million followers on Instagram, states that Meta never informed her about the AI shopping feature and only discovered its reality when another user notified her. 

“I had no idea what she was talking about and asked for her to send a video and a screenshot,” Berolzheimer told Bloomberg in an interview. 

“My primary concern is that it redirects viewers away from the original content I created to something I did not choose to share,” said Berolzheimer, adding that “Shop the Look” has only created confusion among her followers. 

Three months ago, another creator posted to Reddit about the mysterious “Shop the Look” button appearing in their post, suggesting products they weren’t promoting, leading users to a page selling sweaters similar to the Patagonia fleece they were wearing in the video.

“It is not my shop. I don't sell sweaters. And I don't want people thinking that I am trying to sell sweaters with some affiliate deal,” the user wrote.

In response to user outrage, a Meta spokesperson described the limited test as a way to “help people explore products that match their interests when they’re viewing posts or reels, adding that the company is also “exploring different labels.”

Meta has been testing new AI-powered shopping tools for months. In August, the tech giant announced a slew of AI-powered commerce features, including a “Show Products” feature that turns single media partnership ads into catalog ads, as well as the ability to turn a single media Reels ad into a shoppable ad format via “Show Products.”

“Shop the Look” resembles TikTok’s “Find Similar” feature, which is also being tested in the posts of unsuspecting creators, linking users to products available on TikTok Shop. The only difference being that “Find Similar” was reportedly detected on posts from users with low follower counts, effectively as an attempt to turn any user into a creator promoting products.