Meet the AI Influencers Changing the Face of Social Media
The avatars making big bucks in the creator economy
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Aitana Lopez is an influencer. She posts selfies from her bedroom and concerts, has pink hair, and is followed by 200,000 people on social media. Of course, being an influencer she loves nothing more than to talk about her favorite brands, who, according to a report by Ars Technica, often pay upwards of $1,000 for her to promote their products.
She’s also not human.
Aitana is just one of hundreds of so-called “virtual influencers,” digital avatars that, while entirely fictional, have a very real presence in the creator economy where they’re giving real-life influencers a run for their money.
“We were taken aback by the skyrocketing rates influencers charge nowadays. That got us thinking, ‘What if we just create our own influencer?’” said Diana Núñez, co-founder of the Barcelona-based agency The Clueless, which created Aitana, talking to Ars Technica. “The rest is history. We unintentionally created a monster. A beautiful one, though.”
It’s an ironic state of affairs. After all, the job Aitana is fulfilling is notoriously superficial by its very nature. What is an influencer but someone who pretends to be “real” while selling you products? Perhaps it’s not all that surprising that people online are struggling to tell the fakes from the real people. There was already so much fakery to begin with.
If anything, it seems we’ve gone full circle, as businesses skip out the middle person (and people altogether), with their pesky feelings, opinions, and tendencies to cause controversy, and gone back to the fully hollow world of advertising.
Whatever you think of influencers, though, there’s something altogether “off,” about these virtual drones.
With their racially ambiguous features, overly-sexualized presentation (Aitana, for instance, is often showing off Victoria’s Secret underwear), and the fact that they can essentially work all day and live forever (or as long as the brand wants them), it’s hard not to feel uncomfortable about the messages these bots are sending. Nor, for that matter, should it be ignored that marketing teams made up of men are once again taking more control of women’s sexuality as a way to make money.
As Mercer, a human influencer, told Ars Artichna, “It feels like women in recent years have been able to take back some agency, through OnlyFans, through social media, they have been able to take control of their bodies and say ‘for so long men have made money off me, I am going to make money for myself.’” But virtual influencers like Aitana don’t have agency. They don’t need to give consent to any male gaze.
But these avatars aren’t just content with being influencers. They (and I’m using that word loosely) also fancy themselves as pop stars.
Meet Anna Indiana, an AI singer-songwriter:
Unlike Aitana, Anna isn’t fooling anyone, yet. “Her” music certainly needs some work, and I’m not even sure what is happening with her cheeks when she sings. I also can’t help but appreciate the fact that her first song is a dreary piece about betrayal, which includes lyrics about tearing “it all down”. Anna also isn’t really blowing social media up either, unless you include all the YouTubers mocking her.
Anna Indiana is no Taylor Swift, to be certain. But for all the things she is not, she might be a sneak peek into the future.
To be clear, I do not think AI avatars will be knocking real artists off the charts anytime soon. Likewise, I don’t think AI creators are going to put online creators out of business. What I do believe is that we are only on the cusp of a tidal wave of corporate-backed AI “creators,” that will change the internet not so much by the quality of their creations, but the sheer quantity of them.
Final thoughts
No matter how good AI becomes, I’ll personally never stop preferring actual human content. I know many people feel the same way. I also don’t think anyone with a real personality has much to fear from artificial intelligence.
To be blunt, if you think AI will replace you, you probably didn’t have that much going for you anyway, or you placed your bets on a corporation that didn’t care about you in the first place.
But when it comes to the world of marketing, the soullessness of AI might be seen as a feature, rather than a bug.
AI doesn’t have to fake a smile when communicating with its fans, pretend to like a product, or worry about selling out (it’s not earning anything anyway). It won’t even show any reservations about the clothes its “managers” want them to wear.
Maybe it can’t out-create us, but it sure can out-fake us. And with that in mind, perhaps there’s never been a better time to be real.
