By Ada "Peer-Review" Sparks
Warwick Levy has spent fifteen years building Lonely Kids Club, a small Sydney streetwear label. Sometime last year, he found one of his T-shirt designs — identical, down to the line work — for sale on Temu, the Chinese e-commerce giant. Then he found another. Then thousands.
"It was brutal," Levy told The Guardian, describing the moment he first spotted the knockoff. Between 2025 and early this year, he says he located thousands of near-exact copies of his designs on the platform, sold at a fraction of his price.
Levy's theory is that artificial intelligence tools were used to scrape his company's website wholesale — images, layouts, designs and all — and reproduce them at industrial scale for a marketplace with essentially no upper limit on new listings. It's a plausible mechanism: AI-based scraping and image-generation tools have made it trivial to lift a visual style or a specific graphic from any public web page and mass-produce derivative products. Several apparel and art communities have reported similar patterns over the past two years.
But plausible is not proven. Levy has not published forensic evidence — metadata, reverse-image-search trails, or a named tool — showing that AI, rather than simple manual copying (a much older problem on Temu and similar marketplaces), was actually responsible. Temu has not commented on his specific allegations in the reporting reviewed here. No independent researcher or copyright investigator is quoted verifying the scraping claim.
That matters, because "AI did it" has become a reflexive explanation for a much older grievance: marketplace counterfeiting. The two things can coexist — bulk copying at Temu's scale long predates generative AI — but the specific claim of AI-driven design theft, as opposed to plain image copying, remains Levy's own assessment, not an independently confirmed finding.
What's undisputed is the volume: thousands of near-identical items, a small business owner locked out of routine avenues for redress, and a marketplace built to make copying — human or automated — nearly frictionless.
Extraordinary claims. Ordinary evidence? Then no.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."