I'm going with "they absolutely did see it coming and are confident that they can make it go away for less money than an actual marketing campaign that gets the same amount of attention would cost"

They've got a veneer of plausible deniability, basically no need to expend any money on the material, and just enough of a chance to filter out anything that uses the image of someone that could actually afford to fight them in court about it

Oh yeah, the old "make it a contest and have a bunch of people work for you for free" trick.

I hate that this kind of scam works.

I can actually see this as being fully accidental in that light.

Community sourced content is always a minefield. Was it a recent EVO adjacent contest where like three of the finalists were discovered to have used AI Generated Content? And a friend of a friend has explained to me the shockingly painful process of actually determining if the various Gunpla Builders events have 3d printed anything in the submissions.

So I can 100% see an exec or even a community manager wanting to make a name for themselves suggesting they source it through tiktok and let tiktok's filters handle it for them.

That said, this is also 100% The Future. Just think of the various twitch pre-rolls where they have a bunch of streamers selling bounty paper towels. Occasionally I might have a "hmm. is that Fuzlie under the ninety layers of filters and horrible lighting?" but the vast majority are people I have never heard of. Now imagine if those nobody streamers were fully owned AI property of the advertising firm?

And... this shit is not at all new. In recent years there has been a huge rise in vtubers and the vast majority of folk will never know if Project Melody gets a new VA as long as she sounds enough like the past one. But also?

In mother fucking 2001 we had Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and a huge part of the marketing was that the two leads (voiced by Ming-Na Wen and Alec Baldwin) were so photorealistic that they could be actors in a wide range of films and ad campaigns.

And as dystopic as it is? That company owned AI model is never going to suddenly start supporting Palestine and... Okay, they actually will definitely start calling for the eradication of trans people. But no worries on the anti-genocide front. That model will never complain that doing a Pringles ad is demeaning. That model won't use their appearance on a youtuber ran game show to start a solo career. And... that AI model won't need to get scale plus 10 to whip it out "at their peak" and so forth.

Like... this is gonna happen. It might not have been intended to happen this week but... it is coming.