AI-Generated Scams: Fake Hosta Plants Flooding TikTok

TikTok is being flooded with AI-generated videos promoting non-existent hosta plant varieties, targeting gardening enthusiasts with impossible colors and characteristics.

The Rise of Fake Hosta Plant Scams

Hostas are popular shade-loving plants with thousands of legitimate varieties, but scammers are exploiting gardeners’ enthusiasm by selling seeds for fictional types. These include supposedly ‘magical’ rainbow-colored foliage and ‘midnight blue heart’ varieties that allegedly look otherworldly.

The videos promoting these fake plants contain obvious AI hallmarks: water streams that flow through foliage, floating seeds, and claims that these plants can survive in snow despite real hostas being frost-sensitive.

Telltale Signs of AI-Generated Content

These scam videos typically feature impossible plant characteristics, unrealistic growth timelines (plants growing in just three days), and bizarre visual glitches that reveal their AI-generated nature. Author Bree Bridges noted her TikTok feed becoming overwhelmed with this content, describing videos of plants that look like they’re from the ‘Avatar’ planet.

Experts like Bill Hegeman, co-president of the Genesee Valley Hosta Society, have definitively labeled these advertisements as fake, warning gardening enthusiasts to avoid purchasing these non-existent seeds.

Part of a Larger Trend

This phenomenon extends beyond hostas, with AI being used to create videos for various impossible plants. Even before generative AI, seed scams were common online, with photoshopped images of ‘cat face flowers’ being sold on platforms like eBay.

The modern version of these scams utilizes template websites as fronts for drop-shipping operations, with the same dubious seeds appearing across multiple marketplaces including Wish, AliExpress, Amazon, and eBay.

The Evolution of Seed Scams

What’s new is the sophisticated use of AI to create convincing videos rather than just static images. Some accounts are even animating previously photoshopped concepts, such as ‘cute cat orchids’ with blinking eyes, despite comments expressing disbelief that anyone would fall for such obvious fakery.

These scams represent a growing category of ‘AI slop’ – low-quality, mass-produced AI content flooding social media platforms and drowning out legitimate human-created content.