AI influencers now brag about their personalities, their stories, and even make ill-advised decisions.
Aitana Lopez is an influencer who earns up to $11,000 per month.
She regularly travels the world between New York and her home in Catalonia, Spain, promoting beauty brands, Black Friday, her favorite songs and posting numerous thirst traps.
Don’t expect to meet her in the airport’s first class lounge.
Indeed, despite her detailed history and birth chart, mapping the sky at the exact moment of her birth, the 27-year-old beauty is an AI creation.
She is part of a new generation of digitally created avatars who are winning the battle for public attention, joined by chart-topping “singers” Solomon Ray and Breaking Rust and “blonde bombshell” Mia Zelu, who stole the show at the Wimbledon tennis tournament – even though she wasn’t physically there.
“We were campaigning [with humans]” said Andrea Garcia, creative director of AI agency The Clueless, which created Aitana.
“It’s different. [With humans] you have limits based on how long and how often you can retake a photo. There is no margin for error. With AI, we can make changes very easily.
After all, AI creations never have a bad day, miss a note while checking in, are always on time, never complain, and never get caught up in the kind of messy scandals that humans are prone to.
Aitana has made promotional videos for Amazon, while major global brands such as Calvin Klein, Prada, Samsung and YouTube have all used AI influencers.
Garcia points out that his agency invested a lot of time and capital into Aitana, which was “born” through proprietary software it developed.
“We’re grabbing all kinds of information about him,” she told the Post. “We detailed her childhood, what she likes to do in her free time, her favorite films, her enemies when she was little.
“His favorite food is pizza and his first concert was in front of an orchestra. His father loves classical music.”
It also takes time, skill, and both artificial and human intelligence to create the digital photos and videos that appear on Aitana’s feed, where she looks almost real enough to be a flesh-and-blood human.
Come December, Aitana is expected to be able to have five-minute conversations with her fans, who will of course have to pay to chat with her through a platform called Fanvue.
Garcia is as protective of Aitana as she is a true influencer. “She feels like a friend but even more like a daughter,” she added.
The agencies that create these digital personalities claim that their creations are no different from the cartoon characters or superheroes that have been prevalent in society for decades, and no one questions them, so what’s the problem?
In the music industry, AI artists are taking off, whether most listeners realize they exist or not.
AI-generated Christian artist Solomon Ray tops Billboard gospel charts with his song “Find Your Rest”. He’s cleverly billed as a “made-in-Mississippi soul singer” and has over 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, where he even sports a blue “verified artist” checkmark.
Forrest Frank, who himself had a number one Christian hit, pointed out on social media that “AI doesn’t have the Holy Spirit inside of it. So I think it’s really weird to open your mind to something that doesn’t have a spirit.” The good thing for Ray is that at least he couldn’t have been emotionally hurt by that comment.
Similarly, AI-generated singer Breaking Rust climbed the county and western charts, sparking outrage – particularly for breaking into a genre that prides itself on authenticity.
Human singer Breland described the rise as “absolutely a bad sign for the future of music… [and] a concern for everyone in the music industry.
However, fans are voting with their ears and seem to show very little concern.
Other projects are beginning to further blur the lines between reality and the artificial world.
Mia Zelu generated a lot of press with her striking Wimbledon Center Court photo, apparently fooling a cricket star, and many of her 218,000 followers. Her photos are all very realistic, with the only obvious clue that she’s not real being her description as a “digital storyteller and AI-influencer.”
She even posts comments describing her feelings with typos, such as a photo of a rainy night captioned: “There’s something about rainy nights here that seems so familiar. Aaaand yes, I have one.”
Lil Miquela, one of the most followed AI influencers, caused serious backlash when she posted about being diagnosed with leukemia. This may have been orchestrated, at least partially, in an effort to humanize him – but it knocked humans out of good faith.
A typical response read: “This is so disgusting, especially for people who are actually battling cancer. »
The post was a sponsored partnership with a bone marrow donation organization called NMDP.
In a response to People magazine, Erica Jensen, NMDP’s senior vice president of strategy and innovation, attempted to justify the project.
She wrote: “By introducing a fictional, scientifically accurate diagnosis into social feeds, NMDP reached a younger generation while protecting real patients from additional emotional or physical burden. »
However, unlike humans diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses, Lil Miquela will be fine.
Hollywood has played a key role in developing the technology to create AI-generated characters, through its innovations in digital animation and computer-generated imagery (CGI).
However, the introduction of a computer-generated personality, Tilly Norwood – designed, for some reason, to have a more British name than is possible in the real world – also attracted heavy criticism.
Partly because she was unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival by her creator Eline Van der Velden, who described her as “the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman.”
Actors and unions immediately hit back against the “creepy” character and lamented that she “steals human connection.”
Van der Velden defended herself, posting online: “Creating Tilly was, for me, an act of imagination and skill, a bit like drawing a character, writing a role or crafting a performance.”
Tilly’s online account now has a number of disclaimers clearly stating that it is an AI project.
Madeline Salazar, a human content creator who discusses AI and publishes under the name ImMadSal, finds all of this exaggerated.
“I think it’s an unrealistic threat to have an AI actress star in a movie alongside human stars,” she told the Post. “They may be replacing the background actors, but I see the AI as a kind of animation. The people were too dramatic”
Salazar is one of the first people to try a conversation with Aitana. Meanwhile, she asked if humans should be worried.
“We are not competitors, we are a dream team,” Aitana replied.
However, she added menacingly, “But I will say this: If you block me, I might go into revenge glitch mode,” indicating a shade of jealousy that is far too humanistic for many.
