The world of social media advertising is changing dramatically. Artificial intelligence is seeing to that. AI computer programs can now create hyper-realistic virtual influencers and you won’t know the difference between them and the real thing.
As you can imagine, the army of genuine human social media influencers, particularly on TikTok, are very worried about this development. There might be no need for them anymore. AI influencers can be created to order and they can probably do the job better. They will get paid by the advertisers just like the real thing. It’s a takeover by computers. Remember what the experts said about the dangers of AI?
I can foresee the time, too, when domestic animals will be featured on social media websites created by AI programs. It will be a lot easier working with animals when they are perfect looking virtual pets.
Real earners
The picture on this page comes from the Financial Times. It’s of an AI-generated influencer named Aitana Lopez. She has more than 200,000 followers and she posts videos from a bedroom in her fake world, created inside a computer.
Brands are paying $1000 for a post on her social media channel to promote their products. She is a ‘virtual influencer’ and she is one of hundreds of “digital avatars” which are broken into a US$21 billion “content creator economy”.
Technology can spew out these AI influencers at the rate of knots it seems to me. I think there will come a time when there will be no need for genuine human influencers on social media. The whole thing will be fake, CGI and AI-created.
Cheaper and more efficient
It seems that AI-generated influencers were inspired by “skyrocketing rates” that influencers charge. The AI nerds asked themselves whether they could create their own influencer and they can. Diana Núñez, co-founder of the Barcelona-based agency The Clueless, which created Aitana said: “The rest is history. We unintentionally created a monster. A beautiful one, though.”
Brands have latched onto the AI influencer concept as a way to attract attention to their products while reducing costs. And the brands have total control over how the AI-generated influencer operates. The things they say and do. There are no negatives as there might be with a real person who comes with potential controversy and their own demands and opinions.
Disclosure
As far as I know, there’s no requirement at the moment for the creators of AI-generated influencers to disclose that they are fake. Disclosure would help to even up the playing field because at the moment it appears that this is going to be one way traffic towards a marketplace swamped with AI generated influencers and little space for real humans to make a living as an influencer.
India apparently makes it obligatory for creators to reveal AI influencers.
One of the first virtual influencers, Lil Miquela, charges US$100,000 for a deal and they’ve worked with Givenchy, Prada and Burberry.
Undermine equality?
There might be a word of warning in this story. AI generated influencers are often created by men because as I understand it the majority of the nerds working on these programs are males. Does that open the door to sexism in their creations? Here we have men playing God almost in creating alluring female virtual influencers. There may be a danger there. It might be regressive in going back to an age when the woman was in the shadow of the man, before the suffragettes. The development might undermine equality between the sexes.
