AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 317 points – AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans
arstechnica.com

AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans::Brands are turning to hyper-realistic, AI-generated influencers for promotions.

163

That makes sense. The goal always seemed to be as fake as possible.

Oh no, those poor influencers ... anyway ...

Better than AI influencers

In what way?

Coz influencers can be people lucking into it, with AI influencers it's mostly going to be brands cutting out the middlemen and making more money and reducing any chance of people receiving consequences of their actions as they can just delete that AI influencer and create a new one, whereas any human influencer will suffer the consequences even if very little for their actions

What makes you think they can't (and don't) just fire a human influencer and hire a new one whenever they feel like it now?

I did expect that, still better than AI influencers no? Even if by a tiny bit.

Right cuz blaming lobbyists and ad campaigns… that’s totally worked out for tobacco, guns, pharma and vehicle companies looking to shirk any accountability.

Whoah there: Who says AI influencers aren't the result of individual's honest work? You don't need an entire data center of computers to make your own AI influencer!

Don't assume there's a corporation behind every AI persona. It could just be one guy with a lot of VRAM getting creative with prompts in his parent's basement.

How about none at all? But you're probably right that real ones are better than ai. Although ai might be more ethical than some

I prefer to think of it as leveling the playing field. You don’t have to be a 20 year old woman with the right face and body ratios to be an instagram model anymore. Anyone can! Seems like true equality to me.

You just need to be a geek who can afford some 4090 and the software which produce the pretty lady.

You also need an eye for the right aesthetics and some marketing savvy, there's lots of pretty girls who still don't meet the cut for "influencer". Granted, being pretty and having marketing savvy is a really good recipe for success, but it still makes no guarantees.

1 more...

And thus social media has reached its apex.

After a decade plus of bombarding people with a mix of whatever they desire most and whatever causes them to become emotionally invested to the point of exhaustion, we see the pinnacle innovation of social media:

A literally completely fake person selling overpriced fashion I guarantee was made in a sweatshop, that nearly no one viewing 'her' can afford or look good in, who receives many thirsty comments praising her as if 'she' will be their friend or something, who in the process of doing all this also puts out of business actual human models who are simply fake in every sense of the word that is not literal.

It is basically the most perfectly capitalist thing I can imagine. Everyone loses except the capital owners.

I mean sure, maybe it will get some people whose entire personality is "I am pretty, worship me!" to think about doing something actually useful or learning and developing a real personality.

But... we are fairly far into the predicted cyberpunk dystopia now. No its not exactly as predicted, but shockingly close in many ways.

The average consumer of content cannot tell a bot or a fake person such as Aitana here from a real one, and there will just be another after news of Aitana in particular gets around.

At this point I would say that most humans have basically failed a reverse Turing Test.

Yeah, we really are steamrolling right into a cyberpunk dystopia, aren't we? Well, if we can even include the world "punk" there. It might as well just be cyber-capitalism in the end.

I disagree with the word "capitalist", but in emotion and general sense you nailed it.

Just a bit sad we're as a planet navigating Lem's "The Megabit Bomb" and of course "Summa Technologiae" so slowly.

I mean sure, maybe it will get some people whose entire personality is “I am pretty, worship me!” to think about doing something actually useful or learning and developing a real personality.

You'd be surprised.

I hate influencers, aka living adverts

“Then they came for the influencers, and I said nothing…”

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/constructive.png

There's a flaw in this logic: things can be considered constructive and helpful but be entirely wrong.

I always considered this comic to be tongue in cheek, In practice it would not end up like this.

Ok, I'm all for worrying about the impact of AI in jobs but... Living advertisements are easy to replace, what a suprise.

People who make actual interesting and/or funny videos, those that require personal work and are a direct result of the creator's skills or interests, are not really at risk of this.

Wow, a bunch of assholes just getting paid for showing you free stuff they got, pretending to be relatable and your friend while evading their taxes in Dubai, may be out of business. And think of those parents who won't be able to exploit their kids by getting them free toys and exposing them to the whole world!

I don't think I will lose any sleep over this.

People who make actual interesting and/or funny videos, those that require personal work and are a direct result of the creator's skills or interests, are not really at risk of this.

AI has created entire episodes already. Of South Park and Seinfeld, by hobbyists. It's not high quality today, but Pika AI just got released and with the pace of updates we will get to replacing everything soon.

They've chosen series with huge amounts of existing content to imitate and got bad stuff from it. I am not too worried for people making more personal content.

Yeah, maybe some time in the future you'll get infinite serial AI content with basic entertainment value. I'd say half of Disney productions already got there without needing AI, just shotgun writing. And lots of people are already bored of it all and now only look for the good stuff.

Are there actual original ideas coming out of these networks?

I mean yeah, far more than are coming out of Marvel, Disney and Hollywood in general.

(tbf that's not a really high bar. These companies ask writers to NOT take any risk with their writing so to not "rock the boat" so to speak)

Wasn't there a social media website that did a massive bot purge a while ago and most influencers found out that like 90+% of their audiences were actually bots anyway? sounds like this is just a logical conclusion and the rest of us can get on with our lives while bots entertain bots.

Forgive me for being entirely unsympathetic, but I would not call being an “influencer” a “job”.

Even as a job it's highly overpaid. Hardly any "work" or "skill" involved yet makes millions in some cases.

Rarely, TBH. Unless you're OK with being an absolute ass in some form or another.

Yeah just enough people get rich to make you think you have a chance at the same thing. so you start making more content for the site but when you make it it's for free lol.

The same could be said about a lot of sources of income. It's subjective what is considered a job.

Are you a boomer?

Just because you don't like or understand something doesn't mean it's not a job. I think it's a bit ridiculous myself but at end of day it's no different to being a celebrity for whatever reason and it's still a job.

It's odd where people draw the line. It's pretty much the same as previous generations fawning over radio personalities and all the Oprah's and such. To me, modern influences are equivalent to radio/TV hosts - personalities which are paid to promote and market products and lifestyles. Just because there's now more and more specific niches for them, doesn't make them any less valuable in the people's lives who enjoy them and their content.

Nope: mid 30s, politically progressive, software engineer.

I don’t like people who make a living off of simply “being famous” either - e.g. the kardashians.

I understand exactly what an influencer is and does. I just don’t like what they do, because the vast majority of what successful influencers do is to aggressively perpetuate some of the worst aspects of social media, as well as rampant consumerism and unbounded capitalism in general.

And nothing of value was lost.

Well, yes. Looking at human beauty without deep communication and intelligence is similar to playing video games when you want a Matrix-like simulation of our world. You just feel that it's all textures put onto polygons drawn on your screen and there's no magic behind it.

Human beauty is harassing restaurant owners for free food in exchange for exposure

Downvote for - ah, I've already answered your newer comment.

https://www.insider.com/australian-influencers-slammed-for-asking-restaurant-for-free-meals-2022-3

Go ahead and be an apologist for this

Downvote for completely missing the point of my comment because of positive connotations with the word "beauty".

Which influencer kept you in friendzone?

Downvote for keeping spewing something incomprehensible in response to a comment elaborating another comment.

Even if we accept that one can argue like most people in the Web, with two teams and fighting in the right direction, and not be considered an ape, - then you still got even that direction wrong.

As for your question (I suppose it was rhetorical and intended to look edgy), I don't know any "influencers". But of good-looking girls I know those I could really like could as well wear Mandalorian armor at all times.

Did you ever show up to a gym in body paint and make a big show about being kicked out?

No, but it would be interesting to see something like this happen.

People's identities become fully commodified then a technology is invented to simulate it. Late stage capitalist dystopia things.

Good. Fuck anyone who treats 'influencing' as a career.

Remember when we used to shame people for "selling out"? Now we have an entire generation or two who can't sell out faster enough. Crazy.

The thing is that I don't really think anyone does, it's a buzz word construed by traditional media to let them draw hate on to modern competition without admitting they're even worse.

Fit example Kim Kardashian is an influencer unless she's on old media then she's a celebrity, Hank Green is an influencer on tiktok but if was on traditional media he's a science educator... None of these jobs are new it's just that they're not controlled by corporations to the same degree so the rich have invested some money in making you hate them.

This is a problem for the whole internet. I've made a long version of my argument here, but tl;dr as companies clutter the internet with cheaper and cheaper mass produced content, the valuable places will also get ruined. There's an analogy to our physical world: Because we build cheap and ugly cities that roughly look the same, the few places that are beautiful and unique are also ruined, because they're just too valuable; everyone wants to go there. I think that we're already seeing beginning, with pre-existing companies like Reddit that have high quality human-generated content walling themselves off more and more as that content becomes more valuable.

One step closer to the Dead Internet Theory becoming reality

For people like me that hadn't heard bout the theory.

"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Furthermore, some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception, stating "The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population". The date given for this "death" was generally around 2016 or 2017.The theory has gained traction because much of the observed phenomena is grounded in quantifiable phenomena like increased bot traffic. However, the idea that it is a coordinated psyop has been described by Kaitlin Tiffany, staff writer at The Atlantic, as a "paranoid fantasy," even if there are legitimate criticisms involving bot traffic and the integrity of the internet.

^article^ ^|^ ^about^

I mean, it's not that much of a conspiracy, especially if we consider human bots to be bots and not humans.

About the "coordinated" part being false and paranoid - well, it generally works, coordinated or not.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic here - we all do what we can to survive. For some of us, that does mean cashing in on nature's gifts.

There is a darker side here, as much as I like to joke, influencers are people and most people draw the line somewhere. There are some things no-one wants their face tied to. AI personas on the other hand...

Let's define "stealing" and "business" here.

  1. Influencers don't produce anything, nor do they add intrinsic value to products they promote. Not much business to that if you ask me.

  2. They do already compete fiercely for brands' atention so every successful influencer by definition has "stolen" potential income from others.

If you want to split hairs, influencers' work is creating an idealised image that they project to peddle products. If AI can outmatch them in that regard, I see no problem with that.

If your job is easy, then it'll probably get replaced with AI eventually. What's easier than being an influencer?

Damn, what a shame, those poor poor influencers

maybe they need to get an actual job now?

To me, this is just part of the progress. With the introduction of technology, they were the ones to take advantage of Photoshop, Instagram filters and all. Now the technology advanced enough to not only be an instrument to enhance their looks, but to fully replace them.

Progress to where? To complete alienation?

Lately the benefits of technological advancement seem to mostly serve to make some executives wealthier, rather than benefit the whole of society. Same goes here. Rather than somewhat affected by brand deals these figures can be entirely fabricated so that every word of them is optimized for sales.

Even as someone who used to be excited for AI personality developments, looking at this gives me an awful dystopian vibe.

Human influences have always given me dystopian vibes. And they were just making some executives and themselves rich, is not such a big loss..

Human influencers are just celebrities at a smaller scale, and frankly the assumption that influencer/celebrity culture will go away if influencers are replaced I'm seeing in this thread is completely unrealistic. We will just get Coca-ColAIna and L'ÓreAI-chan instead of people occasionally peddling products.

If there's any real concern of artificiality and parasocial following as a replacement for real human connections behind this disdain at influencers, then in no way replacing them with AI is going to fix anything. It will only make it worse. It will lead to custom-tailored indoctrination by brands.

Worse than that, I already see people treating actual artists much in the same way. That the human element in culture doesn't matter as much as having an endless source of nebulous content, and that anyone making art should get a "real job" instead. Nevermind that those are also in line for automation...

'Influencer' as a job has only existed for what, 10 years? I don't think society will collapse without them.

Influencers have a lot of overlap with artistic expression online, but this is not even all that it is about. This is not going to end simply with replacing Logan Paul and stopping at that. This is only one more step in a trend to replace a lot of creative, intellectual and service jobs. Which wouldn't even be so bad if those people had a guarantee of a living and could do anything they want with their time... but this is not how it goes.

We couldn't guarantee a living to all the people who had to go around picking up horse shit or lighting gas streetlamps either. Sure, a UBI would be nice, but technology advances. And I really do not believe it is a slippery slope from ending the career of Logan Paul to ending the career of a future Leonardo Da Vinci.

Back then we couldn't guaranteed. But since productivity has grown immensely. We do grow more than enough food to feed every single person, and often that food it thrown out for a myriad of economic reasons. Technology advances but we see less and less of the benefits. It used to be at least that it freed us from manual labor into service work, but if it takes that too, then what?

You may not believe it all you want, artist are already seeing their careers diminishing in financial viability. Before we even could speculate about the threat to influencers, there were already visual artists and voice actors who gave up because their commissioners and employers decided to use AI instead. One might say "this means they weren't very good so no loss", but how does an artist get good if not practice? Nah, we aren't sliding from ending Logan Paul to ending a prospective Leonardo Da Vinci, likely we already ruined the chances of that Da Vinci and now it's sliding towards influencers.

And you know what, I don't even think Logan Paul is going to lose his job considering how established he is. But some smaller, more integrous and creative influencers might.

But some smaller, more integrous and creative influencers might.

Good, maybe they’ll get a productive job then and stop forcing their attempts at being influencers. You either are or aren’t one; they clearly don’t have what it takes to influence their viewers to buy sponsor products as efficiently.

Advertising isn’t a noble business and influencers are just advertisers. There is no noble human spirit in advertising, it is (and always has been) an exploitative and ignoble career.

"influencers" are more like models than celebrities... they add nothing

Do you really think models add nothing? Because that is a form of art too. If anything the comparison only serves to give some credit to influencers.

I'll bite.. what do models add?

What is there to "bite"? Photography would be a lot more limited without them. Fashion, whether you are into it or not, needs them. Traditional artists rely on them to learn. This is not even bringing up the more salacious side of it which, regardless if you think that is "worthy" or not, it's enjoyed by a lot of people.

I hadn't though about traditional artists. I'll give you that, though most of us don't think about a static model posing while an artist is sculpting or painting them.

Let's be honest photography can stand on its legs without models. And as for fashion, you guessed it right not really into it, but most importantly it adds to the same question we keep asking in this thread, who benefits from this besides Mr versace and a couple other assholes? Really what do they "add"?

Let’s be honest photography can stand on its legs without models.

This is not honest, this is a absolutely bonkers. What do you propose? Only having scenery and animal pictures?

Or should the photographer pose on their own? Maybe get some random people to do it? Guess what, what they are doing is modeling. That's just reinventing modeling in a roundabout way.

The way you question fashion illustrates how all this matter is deeply subjective. Why do people pay money to Mr. Versace? Because they want to look good and they are convinced by his brand's sense of style. Does it seem excessive? To me it does. I don't see the appeal and it's way too expensive for me. But I do appreciate the style some other brands offer, or even what people cobble and sew together on their own.

Is there no art that you appreciate, and couldn't it similarly be judge in such a manner? I play a lot of games. They bring me a lot of fun and occasional thoughtful insights. One might say I'm just wasting time pressing buttons on something that is fake. It wouldn't be an invalid observation but it would gloss over the value that I see in them.

Even getting back to influencers, as fake and greedy some might be, the value they add is not all that different than the value any art adds: the value which the audience sees in them. For any influencer to succeed, there must be many people following them. You can judge their taste but it is worth something for them.

But lets also put in perspective that influencers aren't all millionaire grifters. Some of them are small creators who cultivate an audience with a fun performance and interesting opinions which people enjoy. It's like celebrity culture, but immensely more accessible. If they are gone, and we are back to only having Hollywood worship, would that really be better?

Replacing influencers with ai is not going to fix anything for that we should dismantle social media and have a serious talk all 8 billion of us, but it's not going to make anything worse either, it is already custom tailored indoctrination by brands and a handful of assholes are making stupid amounts of money. I'm not going to cry if that money shifts to different hands.

Yes artists come up often in this kind of discussions, the ones that are losing their job to ai never had one in the first place, same as influencers. What are we talking about, Jim that makes you a custom logo and business cards for your business?

The guy that gets a commission from the newly opened local microbrewery for graffiti-ing their walls is hardly losing any work to ai. If anything they could integrate ai in their creative process.

Good luck convincing 8 billion people all to agree on anything, especially to drop something that has become so enmeshed with people's lives already.

But it is going to make it worse. All the data they are collecting from us will be directly funelled into how best to manipulate us in an individual manner. It is not custom tailored to a personal level yet. Even the most cynical and greedy influencer doesn't have the means to individualize ads. But if it's all AI-created, then it can be done.

Yes artists come up often in this kind of discussions, the ones that are losing their job to ai never had one in the first place

Nice No True Scotsman, sounds like you don't really value their work, that anyone who could be replaced never deserved to earn a living to begin with. I don't think there is anything I can respond to that, because at that point we have a fundamental conflict of values and worldview.

I believe artists, even small artists, deserve to be supported and that our world and culture is better off for that. Including Jim.

The guy that gets a commission from the newly opened local microbrewery for graffiti-ing their walls is hardly losing any work to ai.

That is, until a drone can physically print AI-created graffiti and replace that guy in the same way that the digital artists get replaced

If anything they could integrate ai in their creative process.

Assuming said artist even wants to do that, why would that business hire someone to use an AI if it could do it themselves? The benefit of AI is making content creation easier and faster. It's not enough to say that "artists could just use it" because inevitably that makes it so less artists would be needed or hired for any given work. Say the graffitti artist manages to use said AI and drones and get by. Well, then it doesn't need a team and apprentices anymore. And these won't manage to do the same because the graffiti worked is already handled.

Ultimately, what is all this for? Rather than automation freeing us to have leisure and be creative, it's freeing us to carry boxes in an Amazon warehouse.

Progress to something better or to self-destruction, nothing is forever. The whole social media may disappear at some point, it all depends on the community and human kind as a whole. The simple truth is that people want entertainment, if AI is capable of delivering better, it will be embraced.

I'm not saying that this is good or bad, I don't like it either. So I do what I can to support what I think is good and give my disapprove to what I think is bad. If Instagram becomes a place for AI influencers, I'll just ditch it. This should be the natural reaction of everyone, unfortunately this is what all "influencer" thing was heading to. From the very beginning of their careers they advertise fantasizes, they used every piece of technology available to enhance their looks and lifestyle.

Seems like people are all too eager for this to destroy the field of influencers as a whole, but that is extremely unlikely. If AI influencers don't stick, the human ones will just keep at it as usual, but if it works, then it only becomes more artificial and manipulative. Say what you will about influencers, they don't have the capability to tailor their ads to every single user, but AI could.

Betting on the whole of social media to disappear is wishful thinking, frankly. This genie won't go back in the bottle. The human need for connections is too strong to simply drop it is not going to happen, and any substitute will need to fight uphill against very entrenched massive businesses that shaped it how it is today.

I take your point, but in this specific application (synthetically generated influencer images) it's largely something that falls out for free from a wider stream of research (namely Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models). It's not like it's really coming at the expense of something else.

As for what it's eventually progressing towards - who knows... It has proven to be quite an unpredictable and fruitful field. For example Toyota's research lab recently created a very inspired method of applying Diffusion models to robotic control which I don't think many people were expecting.

That said, there are definitely societal problems surrounding AI, its proposed uses, legislation regarding the acquisition of data, etc. Often times markets incentivize its use for trivial, pointless, or even damaging applications. But IMO it's important to note that it's the fault of the structure of our political economy, not the technology itself.

The ability to extract knowledge and capabilities from large datasets with neural models is truly one of humanity's great achievements (along with metallurgy, the printing press, electricity, digital computing, networking communications, etc.), so the cat's out of the bag. We just have to try and steer it as best we can.

The technology itself may be very interesting and it may not be ultimately the core of the problem, but because there is no attempt to address the problems that arise as its use is spread, it can't help but harm our society. Consider how companies may forgo hiring people to use AI to replace them, which threatens not only influencers but anyone working with writing, visual arts, voice work and consequently communication and service. How it can be used manipulatively to exploit people at a rate never seen before. As many amazing uses there may be for it, there are just as many terrible possibilites.

Meanwhile the average person cannot do much with it beyond using it as a toy, really.

Ultimately the real problem is the system, but as the system refuses to change we are in a collision course. There are calls to ban AI, but that is not the ideal solution, and I don't think it can be done in any case. But we are not having the societal changes direly needed to be able to embrace it and end up with a better world. Sure it will bring massive profits to all sorts of business and industries, but that most likely will come at direct expense of people's livelihoods. Can we even trust the scientific and industrial uses when financial interests direct them in such a way that products are intentionally sabotaged to be less functional and durable, or even which believes "curing diseases is not a sufficiently profitable model"?

These days I just dread the future...

AI will follow a similar curve as computers in general: At first they required giant rooms full of expensive hardware and a team of experts to perform the most basic of functions. Over time they got smaller and cheaper and more efficient. So much so that we all carry around the equivalent of a 2000-era supercomputer in our pockets (see note below).

2-3 years ago you really did need a whole bunch of very expensive GPUs with a lot of VRAM to train a basic diffusion (image) model (aka a LoRA). Today you can do it with a desktop GPU (Nvidia 3090 or 4090 with 24GB of VRAM... Or a 4060 Ti with 16GB and some patience). You can use pretrained diffusion models at reasonable speeds (~1-5 seconds an image, depending on size/quality settings) with any GPU with at least 6GB of VRAM (seriously, try it! It's fun and only takes like 5-10 minutes to install automatic1111 and will provide endless uncensored entertainment).

Large Language Model (LLM) training is still out of reach for desktop GPUs. ChatGPT 3.0 was trained using 10,000 Nvidia A100 chips and if you wanted to run it locally (assuming it was available for download) you'd need the equivalent of 5 A100s (and each one costs about $6700 plus you'd need an expensive server capable of hosting them all simultaneously).

Having said that you can host a smaller LLM such as Llama2 on a desktop GPU and it'll actually perform really well (as in, just a second or two between when you give it a prompt and when it gives you a response). You can also train LoRAs on a desktop GPU just like with diffusion models (e.g. train it with a data set containing your thousands of Lemmy posts so it can mimic your writing style; yes that actually works!).

Not only that but the speed/efficiency of AI tools like LLMs and diffusion models improves by leaps and bounds every few weeks. Seriously: It's hard to keep up! This is how much of a difference a week can make in the world of AI: I bought myself a 4060 Ti as an early Christmas present to myself and was generating 4 (high quality) 768x768 images in about 20 seconds. Then Latent Consistency Models (LCM) came out and suddenly they only took 8s. Then a week later "TurboXL" models became a thing and now I can generate 4 really great 768x768 images in 4 seconds!

At the same time there's been improvements in training efficiency and less VRAM is required in general thanks to those advancements. We're still in the "early days" of AI algorithms (seriously: AI stuff is extremely inefficient right now) so I wouldn't be surprised to see efficiency gains of 1,000-100,000x in the next five years for all kinds of AI tools (language models, image models, weather models, etc).

If you combine just a 100x efficiency gain with five years of merely evolutionary hardware improvements and I wouldn't be surprised to see something even better than ChatGPT 4.0 running locally on people's smartphones with custom training/learning happening in real time (to better match the user's preferences/style).

Note: The latest Google smartphone as of the date of this post is the Pixel 8 which is capable of ~2.4 TeraFLOPS. Even 2yo smartphones were nearing ~2 TeraFLOPS which is about what you'd get out of a supercomputer in the early 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS (see the SVG chart in the middle of the page).

Karl Marx predicted this more than a hundred years ago

Ohhh no...Logan Paul will need to learn a discernable skill of some sort.

He's gotten into wrestling for WWE, and he's actually pretty good at it. He's probably getting paid pretty well there.

I would say he should be worried about CTE injuries but probably it would not be noticeable in his case.

No probably about it, he's one of their top paid stars (although still a ways off of Roman reigns and Lesnar). Which is wild given he only wrestled 6 times this year. But he brings eyes to the product, so WWE have done the maths and deemed it to be worthwhile.

Honestly, he genuinely appears to love beating the crap out of people (and getting the crap beat out of him) in a highly dramatized, highly publicized way.

While I personally would never want to do something like that as a huge part of my life... it seems to tick all his boxes and thus I am actually happy for him.

If he can focus on this and stop running ludicrous crypto scam after some other kind of scam, then good.

I am a terrible watcher of wrestling. I'll watch a show, then not watch one for two years. But I caught his SummerSlam match, and the kid can go. Like, he had all the fundamentals down. The whole going slow that takes forever for wreztlers to learn. He can sell moves with the best of em. His moves were super crisp. Calling the next sequence etc. Do I think he's way overpaid? Yes. Do I hate that some internet guy is being made famous when they squander literal Olympic level wrestlers? Yes. But, I mean, he's putting out good matches..

And yeah, I've never really followed him, so this was always his "redemption" to me. If he's still doing the horseshit I have heard him and Jake do well... But I wanna hope!

Sounds like Rick Subway is out of a job.

I like this reference. Funnily enough I read somewhere that Subway actually did a campaign like that episode.

This seems like a short term problem.

If marketing agencies move to AI influencers, the consumer will slowly catch on and move away from it.

Why?

People like influencers because they want to emulate their style and want essentially word of mouth recommendations on things. There's an element of cognitive dissonance to recognizing they're just a different form of advertising, and I would think that once that loses its human element, that won't be as appealing to consumers who enjoy influencers.

Everybody so afraid of IA turns out it can heal us. Hopefully more people will realize the absurdity of an influencer instead of just trending from AI influencer to “let’s go back to analog human influencers like in the old day”.

You have a point. But one could equally well predict that influencers - or celebrities in general - lose their appeal once people understand that they are not really their friends. The neurotypical mind simply seems not to be wired that way.

I don't understand your comment, especially the last sentence. Who thinks that celebrities are their friends?

Not sure if "friend" is quite the right word, but parasocial interaction is extremely common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956.A parasocial interaction, an exposure that garners interest in a persona, becomes a parasocial relationship after repeated exposure to the media persona causes the media user to develop illusions of intimacy, friendship, and identification. Positive information learned about the media persona results in increased attraction, and the relationship progresses. Parasocial relationships are enhanced due to trust and self-disclosure provided by the media persona.Media users are loyal and feel directly connected to the persona, much as they are connected to their close friends, by observing and interpreting their appearance, gestures, voice, conversation, and conduct. Media personas have a significant amount of influence over media users, positive or negative, informing the way that they perceive certain topics or even their purchasing habits. Studies involving longitudinal effects of parasocial interactions on children are still relatively new, according to developmental psychologist Sandra L. Calvert.Social media introduces additional opportunities for parasocial relationships to intensify because it provides more opportunities for intimate, reciprocal, and frequent interactions between the user and persona. These virtual interactions may involve commenting, following, liking, or direct messaging. The consistency in which the persona appears could also lead to a more intimate perception in the eyes of the user.

^article^ ^|^ ^about^

I guess it's answered. On some level, our brain decides that some perfect strangers are friends or family. How else would one explain that we follow gossip about the lives and relationships of people that we, almost certainly, will never meet?

Don't make fun of the NTs, if nothing else we need someone who can deal with air compressor noises.

I think you are underestimating the cognitive dissonance of most consumers.

It’s generous to call influencers human.

I chuckled at this but I would like to point out that we shouldn't dehumanize influencers. They are just as human as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

Wait...

In some ways, I’m very excited about the sociological and economic opportunities for change this kind of scenario brings. And far, farrr more horrified. I haven’t yet seen a meaningful or impactful use of AI yet, that doesn’t mainly further capitalists or state power over their own or other civilians.

“AI development is dominated by capital, led by some of the world’s most powerful oligopolistic corporations… strengthening capital vis-à-vis labour, and elite sections of labour relative to others, and are hence likely to increase inequality along lines of class stratification that are also lines of gender and race.”

The future is cyberpunk, and Gibson started that as a sci-fi horror show future to avoid. Congress knows that Meta/Zucc influenced the 2016 election via ML/AI targeted ands and did basically nothing.

People who won the genetic lottery are angry that they can't milk their attractive appearence for money anymore.

Well, that's too bad.

I think technically whoever created that AI persona is now profiting from the work they put into creating and maintaining that. It's different than what a human influencer does, but the money they are generating still goes into someone's pocket, not dissolving into thin air. This isn't AI stealing people's jobs, it's someone stealing someone else's market share. It's like a guy with a saw complaining that a guy with a chainsaw is stealing their business.

If it's at all profitable it will end up being companies making up a bunch of new personas eventually. That might be good in that it's more jobs per "influencer," but also maybe lower paying.

Although I'm pretty sure this already happened with fake Instagram models and I don't think it ever really went anywhere. It was just a novel thing for awhile.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

She posts selfies from concerts and her bedroom, while tagging brands such as hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret.

Aitana is a “virtual influencer” created using artificial intelligence tools, one of the hundreds of digital avatars that have broken into the growing $21 billion content creator economy.

Their emergence has led to worry from human influencers their income is being cannibalized and under threat from digital rivals.

That concern is shared by people in more established professions that their livelihoods are under threat from generative AI—technology that can spew out humanlike text, images and code in seconds.

Over the past few years, there have been high-profile partnerships between luxury brands and virtual influencers, including Kim Kardashian’s make-up line KKW Beauty with Noonoouri, and Louis Vuitton with Ayayi.

Instagram analysis of an H&M advert featuring virtual influencer Kuki found that it reached 11 times more people and resulted in a 91 percent decrease in cost per person remembering the advert, compared with a traditional ad.

The original article contains 267 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 37%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

What's funny to me, is AI generated content is virtually indistinguishable from heavily filtered content, but it cannot replicate a high resolution, untouched image.

So, obviously it's putting influencers out of a job.

That's what AI is made for. Bull-shiting.

You guys being unsympathetic towards influencers are all idiots. I'm sorry, but check your privilege. Do you also criticize prostitutes for their line of work? Corporations stealing income from individuals is bad, period.

That is not even a equivalent comparison, the prostitute actually sells a "product/service"; her/his body. What does an influencer sell?

It's not AI stealing the business from humans. It's men stealing the business from women

Do you think women are too stupid to use AI image generators or something? Fuck off with that 1950s attitude.

No. But just look how things are. It's how today's society is, and it's not going to change if you forbid observing it. Right now, most camera users are female and most AI users are male. So you fuck off