Pink-haired Aitana Lopez is followed by more than 200,000 people on social media. She posts selfies from concerts and her bedroom, while tagging brands such as hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret.
Brands have paid about $1,000 a post for her to promote their products on social media—despite the fact that she is entirely fictional.
Aitana is a “virtual influencer” created using artificial intelligence tools, one of the hundreds of digital avatars that have broken into the growing $21 billion content creator economy.
↫ Christina Criddle for Ars Technica
While there’s a ton of questions to be asked about where, exactly, this could lead, and what “AI” will mean for especially women having their likeness recreated as “AI” avatars for people to sleaze over, or worse, the concept of having “AI” influencers doing fairly mundane and harmless things like promote a brand or show some fake photos of their apartments seems fairly benign and even interesting and beneficial to me.
Of course, I say this with all the caveats that this is incredibly early days, we have no idea if there are any shady businesses behind these new “AI” influencers, and so on, and so forth. We’ve all seen what technology such as this can be used for, and it ain’t pretty.
“virtual influencer” is hardly a new concept. If I was so inclined I can buy products advertised by multiple animated or CGI characters. From Micky Mouse to the Hulk. The only reason this is in any way different is someone put “AI” in front of it.
Personally, I find the idea of actors and “influencers” worrying about their likeness being exploited and asking to be compensated as if they were performing live short-sighted.
It’s as if some touristy destination worrying that their streets and monuments would be replicated in a videogame and demanding a sizeable cut for that. Well, this is not even necessary, entire new imaginary locations can be created from scratch.
Similarly, that AI avatar in the linked article wasn’t created using any real person’s likeness.
Actors and “influencers” are going the way of floor salespeople in malls (still there but been to a large degree replaced by online shops) and they are in denial about it. But unlike floor salespeople, actors and “influencers” have the option of selling their likeness for a reasonable amount and staying relevant.
I think that misses the point, how long before the likes of Meta, Apple, MS and Google monopolise these techniques, how do you establish trust, you’ll never see these influences in real life at any venue or event.
Who cares if you’ll never see “virtual influencers” at events? Who is being hurt by their absence? What does trust have to do with anything? Advertising is meant to do one thing – convince you to buy something. I’d suggest you never lose sight of that and remove trust from your equation.
You’re being too narrow in the scope of the term influencer, the fact you are here discussing shows you are subject to influence to those posting here, how would you know?
Those people who influence your coding choices, offer advice and the solutions, potentially in the future none of that will be a genuine evaluation or critique by a real world user, and the same entities that generate the AI content control the channels of communication. Drive revues delivered convincingly by an entity that has never driven, that recipe using a selectively narrow range of “ethical” ingredients, that tested and secure library you were recommended, none of it real.
It’s easy to claim you are not affected, but in fact we all are on just about every level. Even if you find some way to conduct business purely face to face, it’s likely the person sharing their experience with you has already been influenced. It raises the question, is original dead?
`To influence` is not all-encompassing. All people I come into contact with, by whatever means, do not automagically become my `influencers`. If my thinking were too narrow, as you claim, I’d be blind to those simple facts. Contrary to your incorrect assumption, I’d propose your view is far too broad and stretched thin to the point that it has lost any meaning it may have had.
Maybe it’s a generation thing, but I’m not sure I do trust “influencers” far to many just take the money and parrot the message of the product. Look at Binance and FTX. People trusted the influencers and lost big
AI will likely kiloff most of the digital prostitution and online exploitation of real women.
For me as a human being nad as a man there is something collectively humiliating in this. Perhaps the only upside on the other hand it is in unmasking the hypocrisy behind the empowerment narrative of these attention economy stars on instagram on even worse only fans
Thom Holwerda,
I think you are spot on in terms of how these virtual influencers will be used. But really it still seems like the same old crap that human influencers were already doing. The same entities are cutting checks to get audience exposure. Despite the advancements in computer rendering tech, the fundamental role of “influencing” is no faker than it was before.
From Youtube to HowTos, if AI is left unchecked to deliver us A/B certified “premium advice” then nothing that can gain any significant traction will be genuine.
And please do not get me started on patents, it was already hard enough to get the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg and Cook to respect IP, with AI coming on board and creating both artificial prior art and pirated filings anybody with patents should be genuinely worried. You might think it’s paranoia, but my advice would be to avoid casually completing any DuckDuckGo or Google searches of your next big idea.
As a rule of thumb I actively avoid buying products being actively advertised. This help me avoid unnecessary artificial desires and reduce my environmental impact.
An article I read, mentioned that real influencers were so obnoxious, lazy, inflexible and demanding of a high salary that the company built an AI Influencer to replace them for a fraction of the cost. Just as successful if not more so and nobody is the wiser. The quality of AI tech is about to rapidly increase. You will no longer be able to tell real from fake.