Who is Lily Jay? The Australian influencer accused of using AI in aid videos

Summary

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7am Podcast Summary

Episode: Who is Lily Jay? The Australian influencer accused of using AI in aid videos
Air Date: July 22, 2026
Host: Daniel James (Solstice Media)
Guest: Matt Martino, ABC News Verified journalist

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates the case of Lily J, an Australian influencer and founder of the Lily J Foundation, who claimed to be delivering humanitarian aid in global crisis zones. Recent investigations reveal that much of the content purporting to show aid work appears to be AI-generated, raising doubts about the existence of her projects and the legitimacy of her fundraising efforts. The episode also examines the challenges AI poses for charity transparency and donor trust.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Origin of the Investigation

• Anonymous Tip: The story began with a four-word, anonymous tip about Lily J, prompting ABC’s verification team to examine her social media presence.

  “We received a four word tip about Lily J. Totally anonymous, no link. And so we just, you know, googled her and looked into it and came across her Instagram and her foundation.” – Matt Martino (01:25)

• Initial Red Flags: Lily J’s foundation, established only in August the previous year, claimed operations in numerous countries, including relief efforts in Gaza, Uganda, Nepal, the Philippines, and Sudan (02:02).

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Identity & Background of Lily J

• Social Media Persona: Lily J, from Queensland, is an influencer who documented her conversion to Islam, sharing religious content and daily life updates (03:15).
• History: Previously an aspiring singer and actress, Lily J turned to Instagram as an ostensible humanitarian, often sharing images of a lavish lifestyle (03:53).
• Donation Solicitation: Lily J amassed a sizable following, regularly soliciting donations through her platform (03:53).

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Evidence of AI Manipulation in Aid Videos

• Visual Inconsistencies:
  • In one video about an orphanage in Uganda, elements like a shifting window and disappearing banner between cuts raised suspicions (04:48).
  • Logos on clothing appeared distorted, with AI-induced errors like upside-down images and melting letters (05:36–06:12).
• Contacting Authorities:
  • Ugandan officials confirmed no such orphanage was registered.
  • Aid organizations in Gaza and Uganda were unaware of Lily J or her foundation’s work (06:36).
• Bakery in Gaza:
  • Despite Lily J’s claims, no evidence or geolocation of a bakery could be found in Gaza (06:36).

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Transparency & Legitimacy of the Foundation

• Unverifiable Donations:
  • Hard to quantify the money raised, but engagement and testimonies suggest a substantial amount (07:42).
  • Some users expressed concerns about not receiving proof of their donation.
• Legal Registration:
  • The Lily J Foundation is registered as a corporation in Australia, not as a charity. This means it is not subject to government oversight, nor are donations tax-deductible (08:42).

  “There's not a lot of transparency here... It's not accountable to the government when people donate to it. There's no paper trail for where the money is actually going.” – Matt Martino (09:20)

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Foundation's Internal Structure & Evasive Responses

• Directorship:
  • Lily J’s name does not appear in the corporate records; three other directors are listed (10:44).
  • After journalistic inquiries, much of the website content and donation links were removed or replaced (11:20).
• Fake Accolades:
  • Another related website claimed Lily J won a humanitarian award, which appears to be fabricated using AI; the website vanished after ABC inquiries (11:40).

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Lily J’s Public Response

• Denials & Deflections:
  • Lily J posted lengthy YouTube videos calling the investigation a “carefully orchestrated attack” and denying that her orphanage or bakery work was fake (12:17).

  “What you guys don't understand is that this is a carefully orchestrated attack against me. Let me tell you the facts first and then you can decide. I'm gobspacked.” – Lily J (12:17)

• AI Admission:
  • She admitted to using “small elements” of AI for promotional content, claiming real aid was being provided (13:50).

  “Short promotional content contained AI small elements of AI created by our marketing team. It was never, ever meant to substitute any real aid going on.” – Lily J (13:55)

• Bakery Details:
  • Claims that the bakery’s location is secret due to “security reasons,” making it impossible for journalists to verify (12:54).

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Expert and Sector Reactions

• Humanitarian Sector Warnings:
  • The Red Crescent notes a rise in unverified charities.
  • Tim Costello, former World Vision CEO:

    “If your charity isn't registered with the Australian Charities Not For Profit Commission, do not donate.” – Tim Costello (15:57)

• Sectoral Impact:
  • Fears that AI fakery will erode public trust, potentially harming genuine charities and reducing donations (16:44).

  “It's a diabolical problem when it is so easy to manipulate and fake genuine aid on the internet.” – Matt Martino (17:21)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• First suspicions about AI content:

  "...on a worker's T shirt, an extra L starts to appear and sort of meld and disappear in the Lily J Foundation name." – Matt Martino (05:36)

• Host calling out transparency needs:

  "There's not a lot of transparency here. We're not able... to look into its reports. No one is. It's not accountable to the government when people donate to it. There's no paper trail..." – Matt Martino (09:15)

• On donor trust:

  "The worry is that, you know, with the proliferation of AI, there would be a degradation of trust and that would flow through to people not wanting to give their money to aid organizations." – Matt Martino (16:44)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:25 – How ABC discovered the story
• 03:15 – Lily J’s background and rise as an influencer
• 04:48–06:12 – Major visual errors signaling AI fakery
• 06:36 – Contacting authorities, verifying claims
• 08:40 – Registration status of Lily J Foundation
• 10:44 – Ownership and disappearance of web content
• 12:06 – Lily J’s public response
• 13:50 – Admission of AI use in content
• 15:57 – Sector response, caution from Red Crescent and Tim Costello
• 16:44 – Concerns about AI undermining trust in charities

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Conclusion

This episode exposes how the Lily J Foundation appears to have used AI to create fabricated content showcasing dubious humanitarian work, raising significant concerns about transparency and accountability in the charity sector. The story sets off alarms about the ease with which social media, AI tools, and unregulated online fundraising can undermine public trust and harm legitimate aid efforts. Journalists urge donors to verify an organization’s credentials before supporting online humanitarian appeals.

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Transcript

[Lily J]

Alhamdulillah. The orphanage is finally open. Come meet our newest children in Africa.

[Daniel James]

A blonde woman stands among smiling children holding lollipops. A foundation banner hangs behind them. She announces that a new orphanage has opened in Africa.

[Lily J]

Look, they are laughing, singing, dancing, playing together. Kids finally allowed to be kids.

[Daniel James]

But the evidence collected during an ABC investigation suggests that the woman in the video isn't real. Neither are the children or the banner behind them. The scene appears to have been generated using artificial intelligence. Millions of people have watched an Australian influencer promise food, shelter and hope to children in some of the world's most critical crisis zones. Now her foundation is facing questions about its humanitarian claims, the money it's solicited and the damage AI generated appeals could do to public trust in charities. I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven today, ABC News Verified journalist Matt Martino on the Lily J. Foundation and the tangled web behind its humanitarian work. It's Thursday, july 23rd. Matt, to begin with, tell me how you came across this story.

[Matt Martino]

So there's an old adage in journalism that the length of a tip is inverse to its usefulness to you. And that really came up in this story. We received a four word tip about Lily J. Totally anonymous, no link. And so we just, you know, googled her and looked into it and came across her Instagram and her foundation.

[Lily J]

Come with me to visit the orphans today. Today we gave new shoes, clothes, learning materials and sweets to the children.

[Matt Martino]

And the thing that really struck me to begin with was this foundation had only really been set up in sort of August last year, but it was claiming to do all this work in places like Gaza, Uganda, Nepal, Philippines, Sudan, building mosques and establishing orphanages and bakeries. A bakery in Gaza, BILLY J. It's actually open. You know, what we do at ABC News verifies verification journalism. So we sort of test whether content we find on social media all the time matches up with reality. And AI is a big part of that. So we started to find a lot of inconsistencies with reality on the content that Lily J was producing.

[Daniel James]

Who is Lily J? What can you tell us about her?

[Matt Martino]

So Lily J. Is an Australian influencer. She's from Queensland. She's documented her conversion to Islam on social media and she's garnered quite a large following through hot takes about Islam promoting the religion.

[Lily J]

Guys, you will not believe what just happened to me at the mosque today. Today's Friday. Happy Jummah, everyone. I just went to the mosque and I sat after Jumm with my Quran and I literally, I opened the Quran at a random page. I love doing this when I'm like, just need a little bit of guidance for my love or something.

[Matt Martino]

And you will know her main account has a history which goes back to 2012. So we know a bit about her. We. We've seen pictures of quite a lavish lifestyle of high end jewelry and vacations and luxury locations. We do know that at one point she was a singer. We know that she was also at one point an aspiring actress. So she's worn a few hats, we would say, before turning towards being an Instagram influencer and ostensible humanitarian. And she's then sort of used that. Following that, she's built where she solicits donations from the public.

[Daniel James]

And so you get the tip off and you start looking at these videos and posts. What was the first sign to you that some of it might have been fake?

[Matt Martino]

So there are a few videos, but one really jumped out at me of an orphanage in Uganda that Lily J claimed that she had established. So at the beginning of this video, Lily J appears sort of surrounded by African children. In front of this sort of orange building in the background, there's a banner that says Lily J Foundation. And underneath that banner is a window. She announces that the orphanage is open. And then it cuts to another shot of exactly the same location, but in that shot, the window has actually moved and the banner is gone.

[Lily J]

Did you know there is over 150 million orphan children in the world right now?

[Matt Martino]

And then looking through the rest of the video, we discovered more instances of things that look like they could be AI so at one point, on a worker's T shirt, on the back of his T shirt, an extra L starts to appear and sort of meld and disappear in the Lily J Foundation name.

[Lily J]

We bought them new shoes, we washed them, gave them new clothes, everything a child needs.

[Matt Martino]

And at another point, there's a shot of a child wearing a Lily J Foundation T shirt, but the Lily J Foundation logo is upside down.

[Lily J]

This is only just the beginning. Inshallah, together we can make a bigger difference.

[Matt Martino]

So these are all things that indicate that perhaps AI has been involved, because they look like the typical errors that AI would make.

[Daniel James]

So you see these images that appear to have either been generated or manipulated. Which of the Foundation's claims were you simply unable to independently verify? On top of that.

[Matt Martino]

So the Ugandan orphanage. Yes, we contacted the Ugandan government, who confirmed to us that there was no orphanage registered under Ada Nur, the name that Lily J had given to it or her foundation The Lily J Foundation. We also contacted other aid organizations in the region and they hadn't heard of Lily J or this orphanage either. In Gaza, the bakery that she claimed to establish, we were unable to geolocate that bakery. We contacted aid groups there as well who hadn't heard of it either. You know, Gaza is not a huge place and there's not a huge quantity of aid organizations in there. Someone somewhere would have heard of a bakery that's feeding a vast quantity of children every day, but we were unable to find any evidence of it at all.

[Daniel James]

The foundation wasn't just posting about its humanitarian work, it was also asking for donations to support it. What do we know about how much money it was getting and where that money was going?

[Matt Martino]

It's really difficult to quantify how much money might have been donated to the foundation. What we do know is that Lily J has a very large following, but not only that, she gets a lot of engagement from what appear to be genuine Muslims. On her account, they post messages of support, they talk about how they've donated and some of them sort of send comments saying, oh, I haven't got my proof of donation yet. Are you going to send it? Or, you know, they talk about how they got the proof of the donation. So putting a dollar figure on it is, is really difficult. But I think it's safe to say that a substantial number of people have donated. It wouldn't be chump change. The curious thing about it is that on her website the foundation actually admits that it is not a registered charity.

[Daniel James]

So what, what does that mean?

[Matt Martino]

So the foundation is registered in Australia as a, as a corporation. It has directors, but it's not registered with the Australian Charities and Not For Profits Commission, that's the government regulator in Australia, which oversees charities. They're accountable to the regulator. They have to supply transparent reports to them about where the money is going. And if there's any wrongdoing, the regulator can intervene. It means also that if you donate to this foundation, you can't tax deduct your donation. So there's not a lot of transparency here. We're not able, I mean, it's a very young foundation, but we're not able to look into its reports. No one is. It's not accountable to the government when people donate to it. There's no paper trail for where the money is actually going. And that's something that I think is really important when you're dealing with other people's money, to be really accountable about how you're spending it.

[Daniel James]

Still to come what established humanitarian groups say about the Lily J Foundation,

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[Daniel James]

Matt, as you've looked further into the foundation, what have you been able to find out about the woman whose name it uses? Lily J. Does her name appear anywhere in the foundation's corporate records?

[Matt Martino]

Lily J's name does not appear anywhere in the corporate records. In Australia. There's three directors on those corporate records. I did manage to speak to one of those directors, Syed Mohsen. He confirmed that he was a director of the foundation. But then he told me that it was very busy where he was at that point and that he would call me back and hung up the phone. And then he didn't respond to any further inquiries. After we spoke to Syed Mohsen and put in inquiries with the Lily J Foundation, things started to disappear. A lot of the content from the website started to disappear and the donations domain taken off the page and replaced with a statement about how the aid was still continuing and to follow for updates. Additionally, another website which Lily J was involved in, Real Media Group, which had announced that Lily J had won a humanitarian award. That website also went dark after we inquired about it.

[Daniel James]

Since publishing the investigation, Lily J has responded publicly. Tell me about what she said.

[Matt Martino]

So Lily J has responded since we published our reporting over a couple of very long YouTube videos.

[Lily J]

What you guys don't understand is that this is a carefully orchestrated attack against me. Let me tell you the facts first and then you can decide. I'm gobspacked. I don't. I don't even know what to say to this.

[Matt Martino]

She denied that the orphanage was fake. And she says that the bakery itself, that she never said she opened a bakery, that she was always just working with partners on. On the ground and that the bakery was now inaccessible. And. And those partners had moved to another part of Gaza and she's still working with them.

[Lily J]

And now we are operating here distributing bread to the people of Gaza. And no, we Won't be telling you the location of this bakery. We will not be telling you the location of this bakery. We do not want it attacked again like the first bakery.

[Matt Martino]

She claimed to call some of the organizations or some of the initiatives that she had established.

[Lily J]

Live your camera frozen. Oh, here we go. Hi. Alaykum salam. How are you?

[Matt Martino]

It's not clear what time of day these really actually occurred or whether they are genuine or staged or anything like that.

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What are you. What.

[Lily J]

What are we giving today? What is. What are you giving today? To the children. Yeah, that looks great. Very nice.

[Matt Martino]

She says that AI was used in her content.

[Lily J]

Short promotional content contained AI small elements of AI created by our marketing team. It was never, ever meant to substitute any real aid going on. If a video has me in the beginning of the video, it gets a million views. If it doesn't, it gets like 10,000 views. It's just a simple way to get more awareness out there.

[Matt Martino]

That might be a reasonable explanation if it were true, but it's demonstrably false. There is AI all throughout the duration of some of the videos that we have investigated. But what is really conspicuously absent is an explanation for the award that they announced on the website that Lily J had won. This award doesn't exist outside of Lily J's platforms. The images are AI you put them through OpenAI's Synth ID detector, which is an imperceptible watermark that OpenAI adds to its content, and it comes up as positive for being generated by OpenAI's tools. So they are unequivocally AI. She has not offered an explanation as to why she needed to generate AI images and give herself a fake award. If you've got genuine humanitarian credentials, then the question is, why do you feel the need to present yourself that way with a fake award? That's something that she. She still hasn't addressed. And I think her. Her donors really need answers on that, because if she is resorting to that kind of fakery, then it casts a pall over any humanitarian work that she claims that she might have done.

[Daniel James]

You've spoken to established humanitarian groups who have delivered aid in some of these areas for a long time. What do they say about all this?

[Matt Martino]

So the Red Crescent told us that, generally speaking, it had noticed a bit of a proliferation in unverified charities operating in recent years. We also spoke to Tim Costello, who's the former CEO of World Vision. He basically said that if your charity isn't registered with the Australian Charities Not For Profit Commission, do not donate and

[Daniel James]

of those other aid charities that you've spoken to, those humanitarian groups, how worried are they about AI and its usage and making this potentially a broader problem for them and for the, for the charitable sector more broadly?

[Matt Martino]

Well, the thing about charities and stories like this is that when they come out, it makes people think twice about donating. And so the worry is that, you know, with the proliferation of AI, there would be a degradation of trust and that would flow through to people not wanting to give their money to aid organizations. It's incredibly important that people continue to donate because that work that they are doing, the genuine humanitarian work, is so important. It saves lives and it improves lives. And so it is a diabolical problem when it is so easy to manipulate and fake genuine aid on the Internet. It's a problem that's probably only going to continue to get worse as these tools become much easier to operate for people.

[Daniel James]

Well, Matt, thanks for your work on this. It's fascinating stuff. And thanks for coming on 7am thanks

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[Daniel James]

7am did approach Lily J. For comment on the claims that have been made. We didn't receive a response.

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[Daniel James]

Also in the news, Iranian state television has announced air defenses are being activated in the capital Tehran following the 11th straight night of US attacks on the country. It comes as US President Donald Trump stated he has, quote, no interest in talks with Iran at this stage. He suggested that the US could soon target a suspected uranium enrichment site while also stating US Intelligence sees no activity at the facility. And a nationwide test of a national emergency warning system will go ahead next week despite concerns about the extent of its coverage. The test of the new Ausalert system, which sends a 10 second alarm to compatible mobile phones in an area impacted by an emergency, will be carried out on Monday before it goes live in October. But state and territory leaders have raised concerns that the alert won't work on some older models of mobile phones or reach Australians in remote parts of the country. I'm Daniel James. Thank you for listening to 7am we'll be back tomorrow.

[Matt Martino]

Sat.