AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans::Brands are turning to hyper-realistic, AI-generated influencers for promotions.
AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans::Brands are turning to hyper-realistic, AI-generated influencers for promotions.
If your job is easy, then it’ll probably get replaced with AI eventually. What’s easier than being an influencer?
If you only do the easy part, then yes that’s infinitely replaceable. Being a pretty face is exactly that, and AI can do that all day long.
Being actually entertaining and engaging, though, is a different story, and AI is struggling to pick that up. And of course teams of corporate marketers continually fail at this.
But yes, the “job” of “being attractive on the internet” can now be outsourced to machines.
Right, but for corporations once you mention the lack of risk that your AI influencer will rape some kids or turn out to be something equally horrible the equation becomes infinitely skewed in the AI’s favor.
So, what I’m saying is, rule34 people gotta get to work making all those AI do horrible things and we’ll be back to expecting our brand shills to have a heartbeat.
AI is improving by leaps and bounds. I’ve fiddled with Stable Diffusion for over a year and I’ve seen it go from mostly random, highly deformed, blurry Polaroid quality images to high def, lifelike, in almost any pose imaginable images. And the same improvement goes for non-photo quality images too. Highly-skilled illustrators with degrees are mostly fucked. This whole “but I’m so much more efficient” argument doesn’t hold water in our economy. Producing 3X more doesn’t mean people consume 3X more, it means you’re 3X overstaffed.
Now for streamers and influencers I’ll admit some of them have cardboard personalities and are easily replaced. Someone like JSE (I don’t watch much so sorry if my references are dated) is a little more animated than average so that’s gonna be harder to replicate, but does it need to be replicated in order to steal views? Jack is one man and he can’t stream 24x7 and many would prefer an “always on” streamer to someone with better content but available intermittently.
Hell, look at Amazon. It used to be filled with name brand products that you could rely upon because reputations were at stake. Now it’s an endless sea of cloned and relabeled products that are between decent and total crap, but is that hurting Amazon’s bottom line? Nope. The stuff is crap but it’s cheap, readily available, and it arrives in 24 hours. Who needs quality???
TL;DR - AI doesn’t need to be good, it needs to be good enough, and when it breaches that threshold you’ll see quality content creators go into overdrive to keep up or pack it in because the effort is no longer worth the payout.
I mean yeah it is heartbreaking how artists are going to be FURTHER devalued in society 🙃
So much of the job is face tuned and post-productioned anyway. And what are you even doing? Unboxing videos? Soy face in front of a sports car or a machine gun?
The real job of the modern influencer isn’t sitting in front of a camera. It’s all the SEO and brown nosing and cross-posting to raise your brand profile.
In a media economy where everything is online is it any wonder that an AI video in a feedback loop with a bunch of AI controlled bot “users” is going to max out on a platform that only knows how to reward these artificially manipulated metrics?