Virtual Influencers
LilMiquela, Shudu.gram or Blawko22 have many things in common with other influencers. They have thousands (or even over one million in Miquela’s case) of Instagram followers, collaborate with brands and seem to lead perfect lives. However, there is one important detail that makes them different; none of them is real.
The above mentioned accounts are all what’s called virtual or CGI influencers. They’re entirely fictional characters with their own Instagram accounts, posting photos that are often difficult to distinguish from those posted by human influencers. The most popular of virtual influencers, Lil Miquela has collaborated with high fashion brands like Prada, appeared on the covers of 032c and Highsnobiety and her music has gathered thousands of streams on Spotify.
However, a lot of things are unclear about Miquela, namely who is behind her creation and what the aim of the project is. Reportedly it’s a company called Brud, describing itself as “a studio specializing in digital character driven storytelling”. They’ve released a public statement claiming they had liberated Miquela from the labs of the AI firm Cain Intelligence, who wanted to use the ‘robot’ as a servant and sex object for the world’s elite. As far as it’s known, Cain Intelligence does not exist and this story is solely an attempt to give Lil Miquela’s character more depth. Thus the question remains, what the goal of the creators of Lil Miquela and other CGI influencers is.
There are two ways to view this phenomenon. First, as an effort to monetize the attention CGI influencers (and the company that created them) have been gaining. Second, the sudden rise of virtual influencers could also be seen as an art project aiming to provide social commentary on the power of social media. In the world of highly edited photos and carefully curated feeds, the hype surrounding virtual models pretending to be real, highlights how thin the line between real and false has become on the internet.
Virtual humans can have real human fans, with the online sphere as their only meeting place.
The project also seems to question the notion of identity. As Miquela (or actually her creators) can construct an identity solely with the help of social media, that’s so celebrated it gets her on the covers of magazines, the phenomenon implies how big the role of online identity is nowadays.
To get a better grasp on online identity, academia coined the term ‘technoself’, which is slowly evolving into a whole field of study focused on how human identity shapes and evolves in light of adoption of new technology. Additionally, something called the Proteus effect has been observed, describing the tendency of our online personas to affect our offline self by influencing our values and attitudes. And as the emergence of new media provides more and more ways to construct one’s identity, the influence of our online identities on our offline selves, as well as the need to distinguish real from false seem to be increasing.
The distinction is becoming even harder to make when virtual characters start crossing the borders of the medium they were initially created for. When Miquela released music on Spotify, she became more than a virtual Instagrammer. If her music career were to continue, would that also make her a virtual music artist? And if Miquela would decide to go on tour with her music, would her fans show up to a concert given by a projection/hologram?
So perhaps Miquela came into existence in order to confront us with the feeling of ‘uncanny valley’, meaning the way humans tend to feel when looking at images that appear almost, but not exactly human. As a result of advancements in AI, machines are already capable of generating human faces that are indistinguishable from real ones, signifying that the line between reality and fiction will continue blurring. The question is whether the sudden popularity of virtual influencers is only a hype due to the momentum, or if the creation of virtual humans will become so widely accepted that it will turn into an artform that is here to stay.
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NO SERVICE 24/7 is a Berlin-based full-service agency for strategic brand communication operating at the intersection of arts, culture and lifestyle.
