Gayle King

Gayle King (b. 1954, Chevy Chase, Maryland) anchors CBS Mornings and serves as editor-at-large of Oprah Daily, a career that took her from local news in the 1970s to one of the most trusted interviewers in American broadcast journalism.

A face stolen for a diet-scam ad

In early October 2023, a video spread on Instagram and TikTok showing King apparently endorsing a weight-loss product from a company called Artipet. It was a fabrication: scammers had taken an August 31 promotional clip for her radio show and used AI to manipulate her voice into a sales pitch. King alerted her followers directly — “People keep sending me this video and asking about this product and I have NOTHING to do with this company” — and her representatives demanded takedowns.

The episode made her one of the first mainstream news figures hijacked by AI ad fraud, part of a wave that also faked Tom Hanks with a dental-plan ad and MrBeast with a giveaway scam in the same week. As a journalist, King framed it as an audience-trust problem: viewers who believe a synthetic Gayle King today can be sold a synthetic anything tomorrow.

King has not taken a position against AI technology broadly — her objection is to identity theft by deepfake, the same abuse that federal proposals like the NO FAKES Act and platform ad policies now target. Her case is regularly cited in coverage of the FBI’s warnings about surging deepfake fraud complaints.