TikTok is being overrun by Sean Parker’s royal hamsters

Cantina is a San Francisco-based invite-only “new social platform with the most advanced AI character creator.” What that means, in practice, is AI-generated characters (including a dolphin, Dobby the House Elf from Harry Potter, and that Irish hamster king) that you can prompt to send a custom message. Think of it as a mix of Cameo and those dancing elf cards your aunt used to email you over the holidays — the latest profoundly depressing piece of AI slop being shoved into our daily lives.

It’s also the latest venture from Sean Parker, the entrepreneur who helped launch Napster in 1999 and got immortalized for convincing a young Mark Zuckerberg to drop the “the” in his nascent social network The Facebook. Cantina looks to be a re-brand of a failed app called Airtime — which launched as a video-chatting app in 2012 with a $34 million funding round and a celeb-heavy ad campaign, then rebranded as a proto-Discord, before this AI-fueled rebrand.

To get the word out about his new project, Parker has seemingly hired an army of very young people to astroturf TikTok with would-be viral content promoting Cantina, and paying them up to $5,000 a month to do so. According to a job posting on Cantina’s website, the company is hiring “AI content ambassadors,” or, as they used to be called, underpaid (and, in some cases, seemingly underage) street team employees.

“You’ll bring AI-powered characters to life, not just by creating content, but by building a following, engaging with your community, and growing their presence across social platforms,” reads the breathless job description.

The stories masquerade as vaguely plausible scenarios: “WHO is teaching my dad how to make these AI videos…im literally gonna get you,” goes one video. “i haven’t heard from my best friend in almost ten hours and she randomly sends me this???” bemoans a girl with a towel wrapped around her head in another. “the ai note my little sister left when she ran away for two hours,” says another. 

Each video shows an iMessage or email screen to show the “script” for the Cantina-made AI-generated avatar, the better to show how any carelessly shared words can be turned into content with the help of a cute hamster or elf. The TikTok users sharing these posts seem to have no idea — or care — that they’re ads. 

That’s because most, if not all, of the hundreds of Cantina-created posts are unmarked as paid promotions. Some of the videos have a paltry hashtag indicating that they are partnered with Cantina, but most have the appearance that all of these people are real-life users of the tool. The lack of ad tags potentially violates FTC regulations on brand partnerships with content creators on social video platforms, which requires that any paid endorsements be stated “in the video and not just in the description uploaded with the video.” 

The accounts, according to a guidelines document from Cantina, are all owned by the company.

Further, the app requires that ambassadors for the app be 18 or older — but there is no real way for the company to determine age save for a self-disclosure. The company did not respond to an inquiry regarding how it determines the age of its ambassadors. According to the job listing, ambassadors are paid via PayPal.

At least two accounts flagged by Gazetteer to TikTok now have a paid partnership tag on recent posts, indicating that the posts are sponsored content. (TikTok did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) Videos with the tag are dramatically less popular, in most cases amassing a few hundred views compared to the millions of views that the most viral clips earned.

Dozens of other accounts still are unchecked, but savvy users are catching on. “stop milking cantina,” said one disgruntled commenter, in response to a recent video from @texthunt. Another, clearly disgruntled scroller, responded, “this didn’t happen sybau.” The jig is up.

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