Shopify pulls website template after food influencer Molly Baz calls it a 'sicko AI version' of her (www.businessinsider.com)

Shopify pulled a third‑party website theme after food influencer and cookbook author Molly Baz accused the template of using a near‑identical image to her cookbook cover and Instagram photos — calling it a “sicko AI version” of her. The sample design showed a woman in a red sweatshirt eating an onion ring in a butter‑yellow kitchen, mirroring Baz’s signature pose; Shopify said the theme, made by a developer listed as Presidio, violated its terms and was removed once flagged. It remains unclear whether the image was created with generative AI or manually produced; neither Presidio nor Baz’s team commented publicly. The episode highlights a broader AI/ML industry tension: one‑click image generators and massive training datasets can produce outputs that unintentionally (or deliberately) replicate real people’s likenesses or artistic styles, exposing platforms, theme developers and marketers to publicity‑right and copyright risk. Legal experts say this is increasingly inevitable given how models are trained on vast scraped data, and examples such as celebrity deepfakes underscore the problem. For AI/ML practitioners and product teams, the case underscores the need for provenance, stricter vetting of third‑party assets, clearer attribution and rights‑management workflows, and technical safeguards to reduce inadvertent copying when deploying generative imagery at scale.