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.
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”.
The loss of influencers more than makes up for the loss of photographers, newscasters, models, translators, and writers.
/s
Every job I mentioned isn’t speculation. Some of those have already been replaced by AI.
Same happened with every other piece of technology so far. Labour will continue to be replaced by machines. It’s up to us to live from the tools and not for them.
Refrigerators displaced milkmen, cars displaced carriage builders and horse farriers, and other various tools displaced manual laborers. Adoption of these advancements was slow and people often had time to upskill to something else, maybe in the technology that displaced them.
With AI we’re talking a massive displacement across the entirety of our economy. Teachers, actors, lawyers, accountants, programmers, chemists, therapists, writers, illustrators, and many more professions could be on the chopping block within a few years. Can all of these people get a job in data science? Ironically, I think the safest jobs (until AI robotics catches up) will be in the trades, one of the main things college goers are trying to avoid. Again, there are only so many toilets.
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?
It seems reasonable to me that you could admire somebody without thinking that they’re a friend or family. That’s what being a fan is. Some of the more extreme fans are going to want to know intimate details about the object of their admiration. I don’t see how it’s different from any other obsessive hobbyist.
That’s probably true in some contexts. But how many, EG, Raspberry Pi enthusiasts know the name of the senior engineer, let alone their relationship status?
I’m sure you can admire someone’s music or writing without caring one bit about their personal life. But I don’t think you could say the same about an actor. What’s more important for your life: movies or smartphones? So why do we know the names of so many actors but not scientists or engineers?
Despite the label, neurotypicals are not all the same.
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.
The fact people watch influencers gives me no hope they wouldn’t react similarly to an AI influencer. I haven’t heard of any law that requires content creators to mention the use of AI and if there was such a law it would probably get fulfilled by a microscopic blurp at the bottom of the page that nobody reads.