B2B PR Agency Thought Leadership - the future of AI influencers

Written by Simpatico PR

Posted on 2024-07-24

Simpatico PR’s B2B PR agency thought leadership series Ahead of the Curve offers a brief digest of some of the newest thinking in marketing, technology and creativity that our team is working with on behalf of our clients.

In recent weeks we’ve been looking at the impact of generative AI on influencers and the creator economy as well as thinking about emerging opportunities and challenges brand advertisers will face in this field with our client Socially Powerful.

Over the last decade many thought leaders in the tech world as well as commentators concerned with politics, journalism and the media have become increasingly concerned that the concept of a post-truth society where the boundary between truth and untruth is erased, is becoming a reality.

In the context of AI-powered deep fakes damaging political and societal cohesion this is obviously deeply worrying.

And we’re now seeing a similar collision of AI and human perceptions of reality happening in the commercial world.

Chinese fast fashion retailer Shein’s use of AI to create designs sparked the idea that human created content could be replaced by a fake or machine processed version.

Because generative scrapes the internet to learn and find inspiration to deliver its own digested and extrapolated version of information, concerns have been raised by human designers that Shein is in effect ripping off their work.

As a B2B PR agency we’ve debated whether it is right to frame all AI-created content as faux or counterfeit and essentially a bad thing? And, does Shein’s approach to AI creativity suggest that AI output of this kind could become the norm? If so, could it become acceptable, or at least accepted be consumers?

Rise of the cloned influencer?

This question matters hugely to influencers and also to the marketing world. Because generative AI could soon be used to influencers to create virtual copies of themselves and licence those copies to brands to be used in marketing output.

Not only that, but generative AI already has the potential to develop or produce its own version of human output. This means human creators can use it to help them generate new material and present that through the virtual version of themselves – an AI avatar that essentially looks the same as the real influencer.

Digital avatars derived from real humans will challenge our views of whether machine creativity is of genuine worth.

It might be that content featuring flesh and blood influencers, actors and advisors will carry a premium.

At this stage it’s difficult to know, but since AI will be basing its licenced human output on the original influencer’s personality, tastes, views, skills, quirks and foibles, audiences may feel there is little difference.

The fact that generative AI can also be used to tailor and target content to different audience segments and speed up production of it, means however, that the potential to win approval of faux content from real people becomes increasingly likely.

If it is good content, does this matter?

There is already a big market for virtual influencers such as Lu do Magalu, Lil Miquela, Barbie and Guggimon. If these are successful, digital copies of real influencers surely would be too?

Meta is already enabling creators to make AI avatars or chatbots of themselves via AI Studio on Instagram and other platforms are doing similar things.

Meta is already enforcing tags that distinguish between AI produced content and human output.

But as use of vitual AI-powered influencers expands it’s likely regulators will insist on content tags such as “you are watching a true human” or “brought to you by an AI copy of such n’ such.”

Where influencers and brand partners draw the line in this process could be dictated by what audiences will tolerate - what they value or see as credible and useful.

AI influencer marketing 

There are a lot of questions to answer.

How will influencers manage and exploit the opportunity here? How will they control use of personality traits and other qualities. How will these be defined and licenced? How should brands use them?

You only have to look at Tik Tok’s ‘stock avatars’ and ‘creative avatars’, or those offered by Synthesia (which Simpatico PR is testing) and others to see we’re not far from truly authentic human avatars.

Harnessing the technology poses many questions but there’s little doubt that it could help influencers scale their audience reach and commercialise their creator output.

Your very own MrBeast?

For example, how long before we see chatbots using licenced versions of influencers or perhaps actors, musicians and people from other walks of life? Advancing generative AI offers influencers the opportunity to clone themselves into human branded chatbots, becoming in effect ever-present virtual friends and lifestyle companions or advisors.

All of this leads us back to the philosophical and ethical questions about entertainment, education and marketing in a world where the origin or perceived truth of something is fluid.

Simpatico PR is a B2B PR Agency specialising in thought-leadership for innovative businesses.