GoKawiilCoachella kicked off on Friday, and as usual, it’s the place to be for online influencers looking to show off their memorable experiences at the festival. A quick scroll through my social media feeds has already shown me many uncannily attractive figures in glitzy outfits, posing for perfectly staged photographs with celebrities.
Only some of these content creators aren’t really there. They don’t even exist at all outside of our screens. They’re generated using AI tools.
Faking Coachella attendance is nothing new — even real influencers have been doing so in recent years — but generative AI has now progressed to the point where it’s become much harder to pick these synthetic creators out amid the flood of real festival attendees. Some make little effort to hide that the “faces” of such social media accounts are entirely synthetic, tagging their bios and posts with disclosures that proudly identify the page’s personas as so-called “digital creators,” a term that obscures whether the person is AI or simply online. Others I can identify just by using my eyeballs, no disclosures needed.
Ammarathegoat is most likely one such AI influencer trying to sell a false reality to its over 170,000 Instagram followers. Images posted by the account, which has no AI disclosure in the bio, show what looks like an AI-generated avatar posing for pictures with members of the Kardashian/Jenner family and real human content creators like Bretman Rock and James Charles, all with recognizable scenes of Coachella structures in the background. There’s no AI information available from Meta or the creator on any of these posts, but the visual distortions on images and videos (both current and older examples) strongly suggest that Ammarathegoat is AI-generated.
Another Instagram account posting Coachella snaps with the Kardashians/Jenners is Grannyspills, an avatar made with Higgsfield AI according to the creator bio, that’s amassed more than 2 million followers. Like Ammarathegoat, video content posted by Grannyspills moves unnaturally, and images carry other signature AI tells, like being too polished or depicting the avatar with inconsistent body shapes. While the account is also labeled as a “digital creator,” none of the images or videos it’s posted include a clear disclosure beyond an “AI info” tag hidden under the three-dot menu on Instagram’s mobile app. On the desktop version, I can’t see any AI labels at all.
A pattern I’ve observed is that accounts running female-presenting AI avatars like to avoid mentioning that the unnaturally beautiful women you’re seeing aren’t real. A notable exception is Lil Miquela, one of the biggest AI influencers to date, which notably “interviewed” J Balvin for Coachella in 2019, and is back “at” the festival again this year. Meanwhile, Miazelu and Anazelu — two other Instagram accounts with 252,000 and 312,000 followers, respectively — have posted pictures together that are near indistinguishable from those of actual festivalgoers, with casual shots showing believable backgrounds that depict the event. Both accounts describe themselves as AI influencers in their bio, but omit that information across every image or video they’ve published.
It’s easy to understand why these accounts, and many others with fewer followers, are pretending to attend Coachella. California’s festival has already been described as the “Influencer Olympics,” in which content creators compete against each other to secure brand sponsorships and agency representation or simply grow their audiences of remote spectators. Including famous faces in such posts is likely a tactic to increase the reach of these accounts, or to prey on existing fan bases for those actual celebrities.
That potential audience boost also applies to social media accounts that offer more sexualized services on other platforms. One Instagram account that links to an OnlyFans page has posted two images of themself with Coachella headliner Justin Bieber, supposedly taken during the festival. I can’t verify if this is a real person as, again, there are no AI disclosures on the account, but these images may appear to other Instagram users who search for what Bieber was doing during the event.
Many people in the comments can’t tell either. “Does Hailey know about this! Yikes,” replied one commenter. “idk! They weren’t together at the time,” the account responded. This is either more ammunition for the Dead Internet theory, or people are more gullible than I assumed.
Nikki Bellini, an adult-themed AI influencer that directs social media followers to subscribe to its Fanvue account — an OnlyFans-like service that appears friendlier to AI content — made a stir last year after its creator reportedly received “hundreds” of invitations to meet up at Coachella in person.
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