AI Influencers: A New Type of Marketing
How Businesses Are Creating AI Avatars for Social Media
As a business owner, you’ve likely experienced the push from large companies like Amazon encouraging you to use artificial intelligence to generate ad captions. While this can significantly improve your marketing efforts, the rise of internet celebrities has led to the emergence of a new AI-driven tactic you probably haven’t considered: influencer marketing.
In this article, we explore how AI influencers are helping agencies capitalize on sponsorships and brand deals, and explain how you, too, can take advantage of this lucrative opportunity by creating one yourself. Keep reading to learn more.
Aitana: AI Influencer From The Clueless
As artificial intelligence makes its way into the advertising ethos, quickly becoming an integral part of the promotional process, from copy creation to image generation, one business has taken AI advertising a step further. Barcelona-based modeling agency The Clueless is striving to leverage the money-making capabilities of social media influencers, the highest-paid of which raked in over $55 million in 2021, to boost their own revenue. Only, instead of TikTok stars, the company is curating a line of virtual personalities.
This intriguing endeavor certainly seems to be working, seeing as how The Clueless’s top AI influencer – Aitana – generates more than $11,000 per month through life-like sponsored social media posts. For example, in this Instagram post of Aitana on a flight to Vienna, the AI model looks almost indistinguishable from a real influencer.
Previous AI Influencers
Aitana, though one of the more impressive entries in the AI influencer world, is not the first. In fact, actor Matt Frewer made an attempt at creating a fictional celebrity with his satirical Max Headroom, who would poke and probe popular TV personalities under the guise of being a robot. Of course, this isn’t artificial intelligence, but it does showcase our long-standing curiosity with the idea of a non-human personality.
This fascination continued into the early noughties, with Crypton Future Media’s launch of Hatsune Miku – a virtual avatar that allowed budding music producers to synthesize vocals – in 2007. While the virtual likeness of Hatsune Miku quickly became a worldwide phenomenon, even still a real AI influence hadn’t yet been achieved. That was, however, until 2016 when Lil’ Miquela Sousa erupted onto Instagram.
Miquela Sousa, who started out posting only cryptic POV images, had many followers questioning her authenticity, causing the account holder to eventually reveal that Miquela Sousa was, in fact, computer-generated. In the beginning, Miquela Sousa’s images were somewhat primitive and noticeably computer-generated; but, with the recent advancements in AI, her image is now human-like.
The Instagram account now has over two million followers and has enjoyed partnerships with the likes of BMW and Arianna Grande.
How Are AI Influencers Created?
The idea of AI influencers may sound complex, but they’re actually fairly easy to make, thanks to the availability of AI technology. All you need is a way to generate text for social media captions and comments, and a way to generate AI images – both of which can be done with free tools like ChatGPT and Ideogram.
The difficulty, however, lies in automating the process and writing effective image prompts. After all, a true AI influencer should be capable of posting images themselves and responding to content. By using APIs, this is possible but requires a level of technical expertise.
To show how easy it is to create an AI influencer, let’s do so now, using Ideogram and ChatGPT. We asked Ideogram to create an image of a “photorealistic happy man with brown hair and glasses on a flight.”
Then, we switched to ChatGPT and asked it to create a name for a male Instagram influencer with an AI pun – it suggested AidenAlgorithm. Let’s now have ChatGPT generate a caption for the above picture to put into a mock Instagram post. It returned: “Chasing horizons at 30,000 feet. ✈️✨ #SkyboundAdventures #Wanderlust"
Of course, this isn’t perfect, but the Aiden Algorithm was created in mere minutes, all for free. With some fine tuning, this could be the next big AI influencer.
Should Content Creators Be Worried?
If you’re a content creator reading this article, you may be a little worried right now, wondering if the robots are coming for your job, too. No, they’re not. AI influencers are a gimmick and will remain so, as long as they are devoid of the human emotions that inspire online engagement. However, don’t be shocked if you encounter more AI influencers online, as companies continue to adopt AI technology to enhance their marketing strategies.
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