Are AI influencers the latest feature of modern life to make us unhappy?

Rather than pay real-life influencers to promote their products, some companies are turning to artificially generated people

Lu do Magalu has millions of followers on Instagram, however, she is not a real person. Photo: Instagram

Laila Khadraa, a 21-year-old Moroccan social media influencer, is the epitome of the lifestyle-oriented modern woman. She plays football, travels solo (recently jetting off to Germany), has an edgy fashion sense and makes regular trips to the beach – where, of course, the Sun is always shining.

Laila can sometimes be found DJing, describes herself as "a devoted foodie" and whether flashing a grin with her gleaming white teeth or striking a moodier pose for the camera, always looks flawless. With her enviable lifestyle and appearance, Laila has unsurprisingly attracted thousands of followers to her Instagram account, despite being relatively new to the platform.

However, Laila doesn’t actually exist. She is an "AI influencer", one of a new breed of computer-generated characters created by companies – in Laila’s case, the sports clothing producer Puma – to promote their wares. Laila is often pictured in branded T-shirts, football gear or other kit.

There are obvious attractions to firms in creating fictitious but unerringly real-looking AI influencers: such characters are cheaper than real-life influencers, some of whom command thousands of dollars for a single post, and they never go off message and risk tarnishing their benefactor’s image.

Why should we be wary?

Since influencers emerged more than a decade ago, concerns have been expressed that their carefully curated content offers an impossibly perfect vision of life that few can match, potentially affecting the mental well-being of social media users.

Could an artificially generated character with none of the flaws of a real person and who enjoys a lifestyle that is the envy even of the rich and famous, magnify these problems?

Adnan Bashir, a technology commentator and global lead for external communications at Hansen Technologies, a software company, said this was "a very major risk that we’re not paying enough attention to".

"When you give a digital avatar the perfect jawline, the perfect cheekbones, and hair and eyes … you’re further exacerbating these issues in society around body image and mental health and self-esteem," he said.

"We need to avoid the mistakes that we as society – I’m including private entities and governments – made with social media in the sense we didn’t move fast enough, we didn’t introduce regulation, we didn’t pay attention to our communities quickly enough.

"There’s a risk of AI becoming a runaway train and it’s something we need to get ahead of before it starts exacerbating these risks we see in today’s society, especially among the youth."

Being "billboards for hire", influencers in general can "promote a cycle of materialism and triviality", Mr Bashir said, and create "a sense of commercialism and materialism in kids and people who are very impressionable".

"AI influencers, being at [brands’] beck and call in terms of promoting any and all products without any questions asked, could further heighten that risk of creating a class of people focused on just what assets they have or what their shopping haul looks like," he added.

Perhaps the pre-eminent AI influencer currently is Lu do Magalu, created by Magazine Luiza, a Brazilian retail brand. Her Instagram account has a very domestic feel, showing Lu do Magalu painting her toenails, changing the bed sheets, cooking dinner or showing off one or other new household product.

The tame subject matter – and the fact that, unlike Laila Khadraa, Lu do Magalu looks like an artificial creation rather than a real person – has not dampened interest: her Instagram account has no fewer than 7.2 million followers, a number that puts most human influencers in the shade.

One-sided relationship

While such influencers are a recent phenomenon, Dr David DeFranza, assistant professor of marketing at the Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, University College Dublin, said they have emerged in the context of a long tradition of "parasocial", or one-side, relationships with people who did not exist in reality. In the 19th century, for example, a reader may have identified strongly with a character from a novel.

"They say they feel they have an intimate relationship with the protagonist," he said. "This basic phenomenon has existed for a very long time."

Whether AI influencers, for all the interest some of them attract, have a significant effect on people who view their content is, for the moment, unclear. Dr DeFranza’s research team is looking into this very issue but he said so far there was a lack of data to answer the question definitively. He said it was "fairly well known" that impossibly perfect images online, often described as airbrushed, could affect those who viewed them.

"We know this has an impact on self-perception and body image and psychological well-being through the process of comparison, as a means of defining oneself and identify," he said.

But he suggested AI influencers, because they are known to be made-up characters, may have less of a negative effect than real-life influencers. "It’s possible when people engage with a known AI influencer they will engage less in comparison than when it’s known to be human. In that sense we would think of this as an animated character," Dr DeFranza said.

Social media users know that this person represents "a completely manufactured image of a human", so "theoretically it could have less of an impact on well-being".

"But maybe the opposite is true. Maybe it perpetuates this ideal or makes it more extreme," he said.

Researchers such as Dr DeFranza are hoping to drill down into these issues and find out whether AI influencers do risk affecting the self-esteem of social media users – or turn out to be simply harmless diversions. Either way, he said in the near term at least they are likely to become more common, although this may not last.

"Like many things in marketing, we can easily reach a saturation point where their effectiveness decreases and they’re not worth the cost," he said.

So perhaps characters such as Laila Khadraa will not enjoy the high-life of international flights, new clothes and days on the beach for ever.