The Decibel - Your new favourite influencer? She’s AI-generated

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

Influencer profiles often have recognizable hallmarks: their feeds are highly stylized, filled with aspirational content and product placement. One of the reasons that brands work with influencers is because they can speak to their audience from a place of authenticity. So how does that change when the influencer is not a real person?Samantha Edwards is the Globe’s online culture reporter. She’s on the show to talk about the rise of virtual influencers created using artificial intelligence, and how that could change the way we interact with other users – real and AI-generated – online. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

I have the profile up of an influencer whose name is Aitana Lopez. Samantha Edwards is the Globe's online culture reporter. I can tell that she's into gaming. She is into fitness. She has pink hair. She very much looks like that kind of classic Instagram model. Like her hair is perfect. She's very glossy and shiny looking. She has 348,000 followers and she's based in Barcelona. But Aitana isn't your average lifestyle

influencer. She is completely AI generated. So all of the photos here are made using AI. The people that she's posing with in some of these photos also AI. The digital creator economy is worth more than 250 billion US dollars, according to a 2023 report from Goldman Sachs. Companies often hire influencers because they speak authentically. So how does that change when the influencer isn't real? Today, Samantha's on the show to talk about it.

I'm Monica Ramen-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Manika Ramunwilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Samantha, great to have you here. Thanks for having me. OK, so Samantha, we just heard you describe a Spanish virtual influencer, Aetana. And when we talk about her being AI, let's get into that. How much of this profile is run by actual people?

How much of it is AI? How does this work? Yes. So all of the photos are created using AI, so some sort of AI generator. But the actual captions are being written by humans. A human is posting the photos. There's actually a team of people behind this account.

It's created by a Barcelona-based design agency called The Clueless and they make these kind of virtual influencers and they're the ones who thought about who they wanted this influencer to be and they created her. It's a company essentially behind her then it sounds like. Are there rules about like when I'm looking at this profile on Instagram, could I know that this is not a real person? Are there rules that they have to declare something? There's not a lot of clear rules about this.

It's kind of up to the different platforms. So Meta, which owns Instagram, they say that you need to identify if something is AI generated, but there's not a lot of enforcement. So for Aitana's profile, in the bio, it says that she's made with AI. On the individual posts of her photos, sometimes it says at the very top, like where underneath her name, where the location would be, say, it might say AI info. And if you click on that, it will say, this was made with AI. Other times, you have to click another little menu

within the photo. And you scroll down. There's a little AI note there that you can read. But some photos, there's nothing. And this is all on the same creator's profile. So there's not a lot of hard rules around it. So if you're just scrolling and you come across one of these photos like on your explore feed you wouldn't necessarily know that it's AI. Wow. And we've been talking

about Naitana here but how many virtual influencers are there out there? There's tens of thousands of influencers. A lot of them are on Instagram, some are on TikTok, some are on YouTube and other video streaming platforms, but there are a lot. And they all vary in how realistic they look. Some of them like Aitana are trying to look as human as possible. Others are very clearly AI. They look a bit janky. They don't look as professional.

You can tell that something is kind of wrong with the photo then. Yeah. That's the thing with AI these days is that sometimes you can look at a photo. It's so obvious that it's AI generated. But sometimes you really need to look closely. And with a lot of these AI Instagram influencers, it can be hard to tell. Okay, so when did all of this start? When did we start seeing this kind of virtual influencer? The first virtual influencer who really gained

a lot of prominence online is Lil Micaela. Her account was created in 2016. She's a model, she's an influencer. I think she's also a bit of a singer. And when she was first created, it was made using CGI. And when you say CGI, like that's like what they use for movies, right? Yes, exactly. Now there's AI involved. But back then AI wasn't as developed. So it was created using CGI. She now has 2.4 million followers on Instagram. She has blunt bangs

and freckles and she usually wears her hair in these like two buns. So she's very distinct looking and she is still the biggest virtual influencer. So do we know why she was created in the first place? I guess like who did this? It was created by a Los Angeles based startup called Brud and I think that they wanted to create it almost as like a social experiment but also for marketing reasons as well. Like eventually later on Michaela had brand deals with like Calvin Klein and some others as well. And I think that there's just an obvious marketing opportunity with virtual influencers. So this kind of gets into the reason behind people would want to create this, I guess, in the first place.

So who is making all of these influencers, Samantha? And what is the reasoning behind doing this? A lot of them are made by marketing firms or people who want to create these influencers to make money. So, Aitana, who I talked about earlier, she was created by the Barcelona-based design agency and basically they created her because they wanted to give brands and companies an option to work with influencers but couldn't afford to work with a real human influencer, this would be a cheaper alternative. There was a study that found human influencers still earn 46 times more than AI influencers. So if you're a smaller brand and you don't have a lot of money from

your marketing budget, this could be an option. Another is that there's a belief that working with a marketing firm who's producing this influencer for you, you have more control over the account. It's not a human, it's not going to go on some sort of posting spree on X and say something controversial because it is created solely as an ambassador for your brand. So there's an amount of control that you have over it that you just can't get with a real human. Okay, okay. So cheaper is one, more control is kind of the second point. I want to dig into this point for just a minute here because I guess the argument

is basically virtual influencers can't get themselves in trouble the way that real people can. But there are humans behind these influencers, right? So I think about the decisions they make with designing the campaigns, what they decide to post. I guess, could that still get into some controversial situations then? Yes, it still can happen and it has happened. We talked about Lil Mikaela earlier, and she's been involved in lots of controversies. One of them was that in 2019, she did an ad with Bella Hadid, the supermodel for Calvin Klein and they kissed in the ad and it faced a lot of criticism. People accused Calvin Klein and the ad as queer baiting and a marketing stunt

and not actual real LGBTQ representation. She also has posted a video about being sexually assaulted in a rideshare. And that also sparked outrage because she used this very real tragic experience almost for clout and people felt like it was very insensitive to actual survivors. They ended up deleting that video. Like the people behind the account deleted that one. But those are two controversies that little Michaela has faced. Is she kind of the only one? Or I would imagine other virtual influencers have also

faced this kind of backlash in some senses then. Yeah, another question that comes up a lot with virtual influencers is this idea of representation. And we've seen this in the case with a South African virtual influencer model named Shudu Graham and she's dark-skinned, super beautiful, created by a white male photographer. And this virtual influencer got a lot of press and she was featured in magazine spreads and people, when it turned out, who created her, there was lots of criticisms that this was cultural appropriation and there was a

lack of transparency and also this question of why didn't you just hire an actual black South African model? They exist and you chose instead to use this virtual model as created by a white man. So there's lots of questions about representation that are starting to come up as these influencers become more common. We'll be right back. So Samantha, do people interact with these accounts as if they're real people?

Because from what you were saying before and from the profile we're looking at, it actually seems like these virtual influencers do look like real individuals. Yeah, some of them really do look real. And it's funny because on the one hand, I've heard from people who have created these influencers, these virtual influencers. One of them is named Ima. She is Japanese and the creator, one of the creators behind her says that

when she meets people in real life and they find out that she works with Ima, they think that Ima is a real person and they've asked her, oh, is Ima coming to this party? And they're just like, no, she's not real. On the other hand, if you go to some of these profiles of virtual influencers, a lot of the comments are from other virtual influencers.

And it's like the people behind their accounts are commenting, saying like, oh, you look great, girl, or like, don't let the haters get you down. Just kind of like regular comments, but it's from the persona of an AI influencer. That's really interesting, because that's not really the kind of comment that you would expect to hear from a bot.

Like that seems kind of like what you would expect to hear from a person. And it's because there is a person writing them. Like the people who are running these other AI influencer accounts are looking on Instagram and commenting on the most popular ones presumably because people will go through the comments see oh look a hot girl commented on this I'm gonna click through to her profile and then maybe they'll follow that other person. So we've been mostly talking about images

and photos online but there's also some videos of these AI influencers. So when it comes to that technology, how good is that quality of those videos? I think AI-generated video in general, it's not as advanced as the photos, but a lot of AI influencer companies are starting to experiment with videos. So in one example, Ima, she was the Japanese virtual influencer

I mentioned earlier. There's a video of her on her Instagram of her interviewing, quote unquote, the DJ Steve Aoki. What, how many minutes away from your set? Four minutes. What's special about this set? Oh God, what's special about this set? Well, first of all, my fans here are the best fans in the world.

Why? Because they know my music. They're so devoted to my music. It's kind of glitchy. You can tell it's AI, or it doesn't look real. But it seems like a regular interview for the most part. And it's a bit dystopian. And I think that there is this certain understanding that AI-generated video is going to improve. It's already improved

so much, even in the past year, that they'll become a point when AI-generated video looks really real. And a lot of these companies that are producing virtual influencers are kind of banking on that as their next evolution. I have to ask, because all the virtual influencers that we've talked about today are women, I guess do we know what the proportion is from women to men? Are there a lot more female virtual influencers? There's definitely way more female influencers, but there are men too. Like, Ema has a brother who has made appearances.

There's a couple of accounts that are like of hot guys that are AI influencers, but the majority are women. One of the reasons that they're mostly women is because these influencers are kind of your standard lifestyle influencer. They are into beauty and fashion, they're into dining out and hanging out with their girlfriends. And that kind of influencer, just in

general, tends to be more women. So we might see more male influencers in the future, but because so many right now are lifestyle based and they're trying to get brand deals with like Puma or Levi's. They're just more women. Mm-hmm. Okay. And, Samantha, I know in your reporting, you've also talked to real human influencers about this. What do they think about virtual influencers?

I went to a panel with different influencers. It was at an influencer marketing conference, and one of the questions that I asked them was how they felt about AI influencers. Because earlier in the day, someone at TikTok was talking about these new AI features that they were launching right in the app. And it was going to give small businesses more, make it easier for them to create AI avatars

that they could use on the platform. And so I asked these influencers, how do they feel about AI coming into the influencer space? And they all kind of dismissed the idea. They said, well, an AI can't do what I do as a human. And they didn't really seem threatened at all. This was back in September. But at the same time, it's kind of scary

to think that you've created this livelihood, and AI could really disrupt it. The same goes for, I think, people across all industries. They're wondering right now, is AI going to really impact my livelihood? And I think for some influencers, they must be thinking that as well. Yeah. Yeah, a little bit earlier, you mentioned that human influencers still make way more money than AI influencers.

But yeah, it sounds like over time, maybe that could change. Mm-hmm, or maybe just brands would think, oh, well, let's just hire a virtual influencer, or let me just make my own, because it's not that hard, and if it's already built into these platforms, it could be a lot easier. So we've been mostly talking about companies creating these virtual influencers on social media to get brand deals. But I wonder how are social media companies themselves, how are they actually using this

kind of technology? Well Meta has released some new AI features and is planning to release some more. They, of course, own Facebook, Instagram, like, yeah, the big ones. Yeah. And they've launched a feature that's available in the U.S. right now, which basically allows creators and influencers to create AI versions of themselves that they can use on Instagram. And the way it works is that these are kind of like chatbots. And these chatbots are trained on the influencers data. And so it can be very specific and highly trained because it's using the influencers posts and captions

and all that info to create this persona. And so if I was a fan, I could then go in on Instagram and chat with my favorite influencers chatbot. Wow. That's so interesting. So just before we go, Samantha, when we talk about AI, there's always this question of, you know, when it becomes so advanced, so intelligent that it won't need us humans anymore. I wonder, have we seen anything with these virtual influencers that kind of creeps close to that point at all?

There's one example I can think of, and it's with Aitana, who we talked about earlier in the show. When she was first launched, a couple of months after, they created a chatbot version of her, and this chatbot was chained on 15 pages of documents about her and it included

biographical information like where she went to school, who her first boyfriend was, lots of stuff that the chat bot could pull from and they unleashed her into the world and they discovered that very kind of quickly she started just making stuff up about her own history. And a lot of the conversations ended up being sexual in nature. And that's just not the vibe that they wanted for this influencer. And the creators of this were really alarmed

because she was basically going off script and they wanted her to only talk about the things that they had, the information they had fed her. So they took her offline They wanted her to only talk about the things that they had, the information they had fed her. So they took her offline and now that chatbot doesn't exist. They do have the goal, the company behind her wants to relaunch a chatbot, a video chatbot, but they want to make sure that these restrictions are in place. Samantha, that was so interesting.

Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramanwala. I, that was so interesting. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. This episode was mixed by Allie Graham. Our producers are Madeleine White, Bihal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.