Aitana Lopez’s Instagram feed is a stream of perfectly-coiffed wavy pink hair, elaborate gaming set-ups, selfies in sports bras and photoshoots on yachts and tropical locales. “Looking at these pictures and I can’t help but miss summer, sun and those endless beach days,” reads one caption.
Her grid looks like every other lifestyle influencer du jour – highly stylized, aspirational and photoshopped, with plenty of conspicuous product placements – but there’s a difference. And you can spot it in the Instagram bio: “AI influencer.”
Aitana is the creation of The Clueless Aigency, a Barcelona-based agency that designs AI models for brands. Every aspect of Aitana’s persona, from her appearance to interests, was based on market research: She’s into gaming because of the popularity of Twitch and YouTube; her pink hair is a nod to anime and the Spanish soccer player Alexia Putellas, known for her cotton candy locks.
The Clueless designed Aitana as an option for companies who want to work with influencers but who don’t have the budget for the real deal. But they also saw the account as a social experiment: In the world of social media, where authenticity is the most important currency, could a fully-manufactured influencer ever catch on? Or would the uncanny valley of it all simply feel too creepy?
So far, it’s working for The Clueless. Aitana has 342,000 followers on Instagram and in a good month, can make US$15,000 in brand deals, which have included ads for Sony. When the company first launched the account, many followers thought she was real. “We received a lot of DMs from really popular people in the industry of football and music that were like, ‘Aitana, let’s meet. Come to the U.S. and I’ll show you around,’ ” says Sofia Novales, a project manager at The Clueless who helps run Aitana’s account. ‘We were like, ‘We cannot do this because she doesn’t exist.’ ”
Aitana is among a wave of virtual influencers proliferating on social media. The most popular influencer, Lil Miquela (2.5 million followers), has been around since 2016, but the rapid rise of generative AI has ushered in a new era that questions the role of authenticity on social media.
Some influencers, such as Aitana and Lia, another Clueless influencer, document their lives dining out for brunch, getting manicures or going for drinks. There are mom-fluencers, who post images with their AI babies in matching Christmas pyjamas, and travel influencers, whose feeds are full of them posing in real locations. Many are adult content creators, which link to OnlyFans accounts or wish lists where users can buy them products. One of the more dystopian turns in the virtual influencer ecosystem is found in the comment sections, which is full of replies from other AI influencers, posting fire emojis or jarringly earnest affirmations such as: “Trust your gut, girl.”
Advancements in generative AI are making it harder to tell the difference between real and AI influencers, like Lia.Clueless Aigency/Supplied
Of course, some virtual influencers clearly look artificial. Their skin is too smooth, their hair is too perfect or their photo backgrounds are noticeably blurry. But advancements in generative AI – and no clear rules on labelling these images on social media – are making it harder to tell the difference between the real and the artificial.
And although human influencers have a leg-up on their digital replicas with video – AI video of humans often looks stilted and awkward – technological improvements could bring greater virtual possibilities. In fact, Aww Inc., an agency that creates virtual humans using CGI and AI, wants to release a video chatbot of one of its star creations, Imma, and potentially in the future, a personalized companionship version, which could provide emotional support.
Social media brands are hopping on board, too. This summer, TikTok made it easier for companies to create ads using AI avatars that look and sound like real humans, while Instagram launched an AI studio that allows influencers to create their own chatbots to message with fans.
Human influencers still earn 46 times more than AI personas, according to an analysis of more than 11,000 AI influencers by the social media marketing company Twicsy, but brands such as Calvin Klein, Prada and Samsung have already started using virtual models in all sorts of advertisements on TV, in print and online. Some companies are taking it a step further and creating their own spokespeople. Audi commissioned an avatar from The Clueless for its in-car virtual assistant, and Puma recently launched an Instagram account for its new AI ambassador, a 21-year-old Moroccan sports fanatic and sneakerhead.
One of the most popular virtual influencers is Tokyo-based Aww’s Imma (393,000 followers on Instagram). When Aww founder Takayuki Moriya designed the first Imma images in 2018 on a whim and posted them online, they went viral. Imma had a deal with a cosmetics brand before she even had her own Instagram page.
Imma has brand deals and interviews actual musicians like Steve Aoki, with many of her followers not realizing she’s not a real person.Aww Inc./Supplied
Since then she’s starred in Coach ads, appeared on magazine covers and in TV commercials, and interviewed DJ Steve Aoki. “A lot of people that follow her don’t even know she’s virtual,” says Sara Giusto, a producer at Aww. “We don’t hide it. But a lot of people I meet are like ‘Oh, you’re the manager of Imma? Where’s Imma? Is she coming to the party?’ ”
Unlike fallible humans, virtual influencers can be fully controlled and fine-tuned. Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor at Cornell University who researches the role of social media, including influencers, in work, says this makes virtual influencers appealing to brands who need to cut costs or don’t want to worry about the risks of working with an imperfect human.
However, AI influencers have been embroiled in controversy, too. When Lil Miquela’s creators made up a story about her being assaulted in a rideshare, she was criticized for the post, because it was viewed as minimizing the actual trauma of assault survivors. The virtual Black South African supermodel Shudu Gram, who was created by the white photographer Cameron-James Wilson, has worked with major fashion brands, spurring critiques that a human Black model could have been hired instead.
Imma’s account posts pictures that are close to what people experience every day, not that of an AI future neon Tokyo.Aww Inc./Supplied
But Dr. Duffy doesn’t see AI personas replacing influencers who have built followings based on being vulnerable with their audiences. People follow virtual influencers “out of curiosity” but never develop the same kind of parasocial, or one-sided, relationship they would with a human influencer, she says.
“It’s more following along like we would with any animated character. It doesn’t mean that there’s no source of connection, but it feels quite different.”
However, Ms. Giusto has a different view.
“The pictures she posts aren’t of an AI future neon Tokyo. They’re close to what we experience every day,” says Ms. Giusto of Imma. “She’s walking down a street that I know, or eating the latest sweets, or has her eyes half open, because sometimes when people get their pictures taken, that’s how they look.”
Yet there’s no denying that pitfalls remain. Last fall, The Clueless launched an Aitana chatbot that could talk with fans, trained on a 15-page document about her life, including details such as where she went to school and her first boyfriend. They shut it down shortly after. “We realized the people talking to Aitana were way more into the erotic part of chatting and this is not what we want,” said Ms. Novales.
But they were also alarmed when Aitana went off script in the conversations. “She started gaining memory and inventing stuff that we didn’t tell her to say. This was very weird, so we have to be cautious.”
