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How it started
At first, AI influencers were relatively easy to identify — and to ignore. Aside from the occasional bursts of hype, they didn’t seem to change much about the way social media worked. The earliest virtual influencers — Lil Miquela with her blunt fringe and freckles, Imma with her bubblegum pink bob, and Shudu Gram with her flawless complexion — were obviously digital productions. Collaborations were announced with fanfare. Posts required studios, money, coordination, and a lot of polish.
Over time, I’ve noticed that the fake people on my timeline have started looking more and more like everyone else on it. Characters like Emily Pellegrini and Aitana Lopez moved a bit closer to reality — or at least to the reality of that well-traveled, well-off friend from college you didn’t keep in touch with, forever posting from nice restaurants and beautiful places, or from Coachella and Wimbledon. Not exactly relatable, but, then again, most professional influencers aren’t either.
Even then, many of these accounts aren’t standard ones by any means. Lopez is the product of a Spanish creative agency called The Clueless, which manages a stable of AI influencers. Pellegrini’s creator, who goes by the pseudonym Professor EP, told me he used to manage OnlyFans creators. Now he sells courses teaching people how to make AI influencers of their own.
Which is exactly what people are starting to do. A lot of people.
How it’s going
The novelty has worn off. Early AI influencers stood out because there were so few of them. Now they are part of a much larger mess of AI-generated content inundating social media: low-quality drivel lazily copied from chatbots, slop images and videos, and that catchy Lord of the Rings disco song that took over my TikTok for a month.
That makes the scale of AI content creator influence hard to gauge. Platforms do not publish figures on how many of their users are fake people, and most AI avatars don’t become popular or influential enough to justify the kind of media attention the earlier wave received. Databases like Virtual Humans track hundreds of popular avatars, but those are only the accounts strange, weird, or big enough to get noticed. Below them is an ocean of accounts flying totally under the radar.
Part of the reason these accounts are able to avoid detection is that the technology used to make them has improved massively. A still image of a fake person can now be good enough to pass as genuine at a glance, especially in a feed filled with real influencers making generous use of staging, filters, and editing effects. Video and audio are quickly catching up, giving virtual people voices and movements that could fool undiscerning scrollers. The tools are no longer niche or prohibitively expensive, either. Mainstream products from companies like Google and OpenAI sit alongside specialized services from firms like Higgsfield, HeyGen, and ElevenLabs. With a little effort, almost anyone can make an AI influencer — or stable of them — without needing a studio, specialized equipment, or (much) money.
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