The Rise Of AI Influencers
Love it or hate it, AI is here to stay. It has slowly started to creep into nearly every major industry on the planet. Being integrated into our daily lives through our smartphones. And, as AI technology continues to improve, we are undoubtedly going to see it blend into more aspects of our day to day lives.
In that regard AI is a lot like social media. No one can deny the stranglehold social media has over our global society. It too has become an integral part of nearly every professional sector. And most people have, at the very least, one social media profile. It is estimated that the average person spends 2 and a half hours on social media every day. This is a staggering amount of time when looked at in regards to the global population.
The popularity of social media has led to the rise of what we call Influencers. People whose entire career is focused around maintaining an active presence on social media. Creating content. Interacting with their followers. Engaging in the latest social trends and sharing snippets of their life. The influencer lifestyle is an appealing one. And a potentially lucrative one. The money influencers make from their sponsorships is eye-watering.
Not everyone is built to be an influencer. It takes a lot of natural charisma and charm to pull it off. But, with AI now at the point where we can generate lifelike images and chat bots that are almost indistinguishable from real humans, we are seeing a lot more AI influencers appear.
How Do AI Influencers Work
Fake character profiles aren’t a new concept by any means. We have seen a number of digital personas become extremely successful on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. But AI influencers are being designed to take this to the next level. Before any digital persona would still require a degree of creative input from the account creator. Whereas an AI influencer could, in theory, operate entirely independently.
Using AI image generators to continually produce new content, these accounts can simulate the entire life of an influencer. Including any brand deals they might acquire. With AI image generation still being as unreliable as it is right now, most AI influencer accounts still need at least a moderate bit of human input to ensure the images are consistent.
But why would anyone want to create an AI influencer? The main reason is, of course, money. Instagram has an estimated 500 million daily users. TikTok has roughly 2.5 billion daily users. Facebook has 2.11 billion daily users. So, as you can guess by these social media stats, that is a lot of potential customers for companies to market too. Using influencers to market products has become one of the most effective business strategies of the digital age.
The main issue companies face is finding the right influencers to work with. And there is always the chance an influencer might say no. Or be too busy to fit a new brand sponsorship deal into their content creation schedule. AI influencers, in theory, have no such limitations. They don’t have to plan photoshoots or limit how many brand deals they have. They can create an infinite amount of sponsored content.
Meta Joins The Fray
This idea is so appealing that Meta, the owner of Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp, have declared that they are planning to integrate AI profile creation tools into their social media platforms. They claim that this is in hopes of attracting a younger audience to their platforms. But social media is already extremely popular with the younger generations.
This is where the first alarm bells ring for us. It should be obvious that Meta is hoping to utilize AI influencers to expand their already impressive marketing reach. Perhaps hoping to shift companies away from using real influencers. Instead hoping they will pay Meta directly to have an army of AI influencers advertise for them.
This might be outlandish thinking. It might be right on the money. We can’t know for sure. What we can be fairly certain of is the fact that AI influencers are the future of social media. Love them or hate them. The idea is too lucrative to not be capitalized on.
We have spent a lot of time focusing on the more greedy aspects of AI influencers. And it would be irresponsible of us not to acknowledge the potential good that could come from them. AI influencers could be used in a number of different ways. Education AI accounts would be a fantastic addition to a lot of social media platforms. The AI chatbot functionality of these accounts would allow followers to learn more about a subject in an engaging way.
