About

AI Influencers or Artificial Intelligence-Generated Influencers are a type of virtual influencer comprised of online profiles and personas created to portray a social media influencer lifestyle with images and videos that are completely generated by artificial intelligence. Starting in 2021, these types of accounts have evolved from simple images and chatbots to videos designed to appear human.

Origin

On May 10th, 2021, one of the first AI influencers, @_Lia27^[1] uploaded an edited photo of them appearing to be in New York. This trip to New York was capped off with additional photos of the AI model in New York, concluding with the social media post on May 14th, 2021, in which a photo edit of the Times Square Billboard was used to promote the chatbot, and the caption on the image^[2] asking followers if they saw Lia during their time in New York (shown below).

As the technology progressed and AI became more advanced, creating a chatbot that is able to be recorded as part of videos and give a life-like façade became possible, with Neuro-Sama's December 19th, 2022, debut^[3] being a turning point in what AI Generation can do for content creation and influencer culture (shown below).

Spread

With the release of GPT-4 and the accompanying modules, social media images and videos became much more consistent and easier to generate, leading to a large boom in Spring 2023 with more AI influencers popping up. On March 20th, 2023, the AI influencer @AiModelMilla^[4] uploaded images of them pretending to be enjoying a fashion runway event using Stable Diffusion as the generator for the content (shown below).

Fashion without limits, powered by AI 🌟🔋 #aifashionista #fashion #ai #stablediffusion #aigirls #catwalk #runway #red pic.twitter.com/5LKZJYxsCv

— Milla Sofia (@AiModelMilla) March 20, 2023

On July 19th, Futurism published an article titled "Fully AI-Generated Influencers Are Getting Thousands of Reactions Per Thirst Trap" discussing the phenomenon of AI influencers, which included examples such as Milla Sofia, Alexis Ivyedge, Lu Xu and others.^[6] Roughly a month later, Futurism^[7] then interviewed the creator of Natalia Novak (another AI-generated influencer), whose creator told them his intent was not to mislead people into believing they're real women:

Most of us have some form of disclosure, like saying we're "virtual" or outright AI, because as much as it is fun to play on the novelty and confusion around AI, deception isn't the point of it nearly as often as people might think.

On July 31st, 2023, the AI model and virtual influencer @VeranoVicki^[5] uploaded a video of an AI-generated model pretending to do a TikTok lip dub. Unlike other AI influencers, the profile name did not include "AI" in the title and did not tag any AI-related tools, accounts or other hashtags, giving it the appearance of being a real social influencer, with many comments unironically displaying thirst and appearing to believe it was a real person (shown below).

I think my attempts at these cute lip sync videos can use a little work, but thought I’d post this one anyway just for the heck of it 😁 pic.twitter.com/rU94jdwcHg

— Vicki_verano (@VeranoVicki) August 1, 2023

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References