Chinese fast-fashion company Shein said on Thursday it will investigate an advertisement posted on its website that used a model, real or AI-generated, who looked a great deal like accused murderer Luigi Mangione.
“The image in question was provided by a third-party vendor and was removed immediately upon discovery,” Shein said in a statement Thursday.
“We have stringent standards for all listings on our platform. We are conducting a thorough investigation, strengthening our monitoring processes, and will take appropriate action against the vendor in line with our policies,” Shein said.
The advertisement sat on Shein’s website for an unknown length of time before it became a social media sensation on Tuesday. “Luigi Mangione Shein” quickly became a trending topic. The company deleted the ad, which was hawking a white shirt for $11.69, on Wednesday afternoon.
Internet sleuths puzzled over whether the low-res photo was an AI creation, or simply a photo of a model who has the misfortune of looking exactly like Mangione. The BBC used Amazon Rekognition, an AI-powered facial recognition software package, to analyze the photo and found a 99.9 percent match between the Shein advertisement and a snapshot of Mangione at a court hearing.
Several AI experts told the BBC they believed the photo was digitally created, pointing to telltale signs like the model’s strange skin texture and slightly off-kilter fingers. Image generators often struggle to create realistic human fingers and hands.
NBC News reported that the third-party vendor for the shirt, a menswear company called Manfinity, has “multiple images that appear to be A.I.-generated” on its website. The company and its attorneys refused to comment when contacted by NBC. Additionally, the company’s email address is not working, and its listed street address in Detroit appears to be fake.
The real Luigi Mangione, 27, is in prison after pleading not guilty to shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back in December. Thompson was married and had two children.
Mangione wrote a manifesto in which he said he murdered the executive because he thinks medical care is too expensive, and “these parasites simply had it coming.”
As to why Shein, Manfinity, or some third-party ad agency might decide to use an unrepentant confessed murderer to sell T-shirts, Mangione became a folk hero in the bloodthirsty sewers of the anti-capitalist left, a symbol of violent revolution against corporate America. Some of his followers regard him as a sex object.
“Mangione is particularly popular in China, where social media users have openly expressed adoration for him on apps like RedNote,” NBC News noted.
This could be partly due to the migration of American users to RedNote from TikTok earlier this year, when it seemed as if TikTok could be banned in the United States, but Chinese users reportedly enjoyed creating memes and even cosplaying as the accused killer before the wave of American TikTok refugees arrived.
The shirt advertised with the Mangione lookalike was reportedly available in four sizes, and three of them sold out before the ad was deleted on Wednesday.
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