Can Influencers be automated with AI?

In 2021, Prada created “Candy,” an influencer designed to sell perfume. With an appearance rendered using then-state-of-the-art tools, Candy’s not-quite-real vibe felt straight out of the Silicon (Uncanny) Valley. It was peppy, but cartoonlike, and it was hard to see how Candy could sell perfume it could never smell.

Since then, technologies have greatly improved. A brand can now render any persona with a product, create movies with that model persona animated in a realistic way, and show them demonstrating products. By creating their own influencers, brands can keep their advertising budgets down and generate profits. It’s possible that the virtual influencers will come for even more human-influencer jobs as the financial opportunities continue to grow.

Long before the internet, the idea of ​​“influencing” existed as “sales.” People have sold things to others since currency began, and while it takes labor, time, and effort to persuade others to buy what one is selling, different types of techniques and tactics emerged over the years to varying degrees of success.

The rise of social media channels such as Facebook, X, Pinterest, and especially Instagram, enabled broader reach for those unable to afford network advertising. As a result of this shift, brands began to outsource marketing to people using these models to share and demonstrate their products and services through brand partnerships.

In a short time, the influencer industry has exploded in growth: The global influencer marketing platform market size is set to grow from around $23.6 billion this year to roughly $70.9 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. Influencing has become an aspirational profession for one in three people ages 18 to 30—and for those who succeed, a substantial income awaits.

Influencers are successful due to their relatability, charm, resonance, and the ways they represent a lifestyle or objects that others wish to emulate, replicate, or possess.

Martha Stewart, an early influencer, started with books before harnessing television and print media to convince thousands that they could also realize the fantasy that she portrayed. Her partnerships with Target, Macy’s, QVC, and Kohler, brought her “endorsements” of products, tools, and decorations, into homes, creating a multichannel, multisensory impression—and earned her a $400 million fortune.

Celebrities like Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Brooke Shields may not invent what they sell, but they successfully promote products to their fans, building upon the parasocial (one-sided) relationships that fans project onto them. Influencing has gotten increasingly personal over time, with Influencers extending their reach to give us peeks into their homes and lives.

But influencers can also be regular people with the attributes and willingness to invite their followers into their lives. Influencers with no celebrity status, but the ability to be persuasive salespeople for brands, are plentiful.

Virtual influencers already exist with varying degrees of success and popularity, ranging from animated characters to realistically modeled personas. With the kind of money that is up for grabs, some businesses are creating AI personas or are considering applying these technologies to replace human influencers to maximize profits.

Or will they? A sense of agency is what defines successful human influencers. We don’t know what they are going to do, or how they are going to do it—and that novelty is appealing.

Part of what attracts us to influencers are their stories, their lived experiences, and their families. These, in turn, create a brand message that attracts endorsements and piques our interest. Without a story and background, an influencer’s sponsored post is just an ad similar to any other.

There is, of course, a price to being an influencer. Megs Mahoney Dusil is the co-owner of the Purse Forum, a premier destination for handbag, jewelry, and brand communities. In “The Price of Influence: When Your Life Becomes Your Brand,” Dunsil reflects on 20 years of being influential, observing that for her, “kids” and “tragedy” were the highest performing topics for platform traffic. She describes the performative aspect of being an influencer as “emotional labor in disguise, a tightrope of constant negotiation between the person you are and the persona you project.”

Good or bad, Dusil’s realization may pave the way for humans and AI to form influencer partnerships, where their demonstrations and emotional connections are combined with software tools and renderings to provide a quasi-real experience.

Human influencers could keep their profits (and their privacy), by using software like Synthesia, Vidyard, Rephrase AI, Adobe Substance 3D, and others to generate facsimiles of themselves, without having to reveal all. They could also benefit from the cost savings of realistic software tools, too, saving money and time on travel by creating the environment they present in a home studio.

Time will tell if virtual influencers will make a difference as to how we are persuaded. We already see influencers through mediated channels, so it won’t be that different for us to have a window into the fantasy of a digitally realized influencer hearth, rather than their actual home.

But will we be comfortable buying products sold to us by beings that aren’t real? We might. We have already been acclimated to fantasy advertising campaigns. This would just circle us back to “celebrity territory” where the parasocial relationships we have with the personas selling us things, are those one-sided ones that we project onto them, and are not real.

As with most jobs lately, it’s likely that AI will come for influencers, but with some savvy vibe-coding, influencers may be able to retain their brand partnerships, privacy, and income.