AI fakes compete in the advertising market with influencers – 12/29/2023 – Tech

Pink-haired Aitana Lopez is followed by more than 200,000 people on social media. She posts selfies from shows and her bedroom, in which she tags brands like hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret.

Companies pay around US$1,000 (R$4,841) per post to promote their products on social media — even though the model is completely fictitious.

Aitana is a “virtual influencer” created using artificial intelligence tools, one of hundreds of digital avatars who have entered the growing US$21 billion (R$102 billion) content creator economy.

Its emergence has caused human influencers to worry that their income is being cannibalized and threatened by digital competitors. This concern is shared by people in more established professions whose livelihoods are threatened by generative AI — technology that can generate human-like text, images and code in seconds.

But those behind the hyper-realistic AI creations argue that they are just disrupting an overinflated market.

“We were surprised by the astronomical fees that influencers charge these days. It made us think, ‘What if we created our own influencer?'” said Diana Núñez, co-founder of Barcelona-based agency The Clueless, which created Aitana . “The rest is history. We unwittingly created a monster. A beautiful monster, nonetheless.”

In recent years, there have been high-profile partnerships between luxury brands and virtual influencers, including Kim Kardashian’s KKW Beauty makeup line with Noonoouri and Louis Vuitton with Ayayi.

An Instagram analysis of an H&M ad featuring virtual influencer Kuki found that it reached 11 times more people and resulted in a 91% reduction in the cost per person who remembers the ad, compared to a traditional ad.

“It’s not influencing purchase like a human influencer would, but it is increasing brand awareness, favorability and recall,” said Becky Owen, global director of marketing and innovation at Billion Dollar Boy and former head of the company’s innovations team. Meta creators.

Brands have been rushing to engage with virtual influencers as a new way to attract attention and reduce costs.

“Influencers themselves have a lot of negative associations related to fakeness or superficiality, which makes people feel less concerned about the idea of ​​it being replaced by AI or virtual influencers,” said Rebecca McGrath, associate director of media and technology at Mintel .

“For a brand, they have complete control compared to a real person coming in with potential controversies, their own demands, their own opinions,” McGrath added.

Human influencers argue that their virtual counterparts should have to disclose that they are not real, however. “What scares me about these influencers is how hard it is to tell they’re fake,” said Danae Mercer, a content creator with more than 2 million followers.

The UK’s Advertising Standards Agency said it was “fully aware of the emergence of virtual influencers in this space”, but said there was no rule requiring them to declare they were AI-generated.

Many other markets are grappling with the issue, with India being one country that forces virtual influencers to reveal their AI origins.

Although The Clueless discloses that Aitana is fake through the hashtag #aimodel on her Instagram profile, many others do not or use vague terms like #digitalinfluencer.

“Although we made it clear that she was an AI-generated model, initially, most of her followers did not question her authenticity, they truly believed in her existence,” said Núñez, who added that Aitana received several requests to meet followers in person.

One of the first virtual influencers, Lil Miquela, charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for any deal and has worked with Burberry, Prada and Givenchy.

While AI is used to generate content for Lil Miquela, the team behind the creation “strongly believes that the narrative behind virtual creators cannot be fully replicated by generative AI,” said Ridhima Kahn, vice president of business development of Dapper Labs, which oversees Lil Miquela’s partnerships.

“A lot of companies are launching virtual influencers that they generated in a day, and they’re not really putting in that human element [na mensagem]… and I don’t believe that will be the long-term strategy,” she added.

Lil Miquela is considered by many to be mixed race, and her audience of nearly 3 million followers ranges from the United States to Asia and Latin America. Meanwhile, The Clueless is now developing another creation they call a “curvy Mexican” named Laila.

Francesca Sobande, senior lecturer in digital media studies at Cardiff University, has researched online influencers with racially ambiguous characteristics and suggests that the motivations behind giving some of these characteristics are “just another form of marketing” to reach a wider audience, when “something was created with a focus on profit.”

“[Isso] It can be very convenient for brands that want to identify global marketing strategies and try to project an empty image that can be perceived as progressive,” said Sobande, adding that “it rarely appears to be people of color” creating the virtual avatars.

Dapper Labs emphasized that the team behind Lil Miquela is diverse and reflective of its audience. Clueless said its creations were designed to “foster inclusion and provide opportunities for collectives who have faced exclusion for a long time.”

The creations of Clueless, among other online influencers, have also been criticized for being overly sexualized, with Aitana regularly appearing in underwear. The agency stated that sexualization is “prevalent with real models and influencers” and that its creations “solely reflect these established practices without deviating from current industry norms.”

Mercer, the human influencer, argued: “It seems like women in the last few years have been able to regain some control, through OnlyFans, through social media, they’ve been able to control their bodies and say ‘for so long men have made money from me, now I’m going to make money for myself’.”

But she said AI-generated creations, often made by men, were once again profiting from female sexuality. “That’s the reason behind the growth of these accounts. It’s to make money.”