AI influencers are making millions. What are we poor meatbags to do?
If you’re annoyed with how artificial intelligence continues to take away opportunities from humans, join the club. The situation is not going to improve for us meatbags, either.
A site called Kapwing did a dive into virtual influencers, AI creations that don’t exist. They’re synthetic things that have nonetheless captured millions of followers. You may not know their names, but an incredible number of people do. Here are some top-level points, but if you want to go deeper, the report can be found here.
- There’s Polar: a virtual pop singer with over 2M TikTok followers.
- APOKI is a Korean AI-generated artist with 4.4M followers on TikTok
- You may have heard of Hatsune Miku, a Japanese singing voice synthesizer featured in over 100,000 songs.
- Brazilian supermarket mascot(!!!) Lu of Magalu is the highest-paid virtual influencer. It earned an estimated $2,539,680 last year.
- Barbie (yes, the doll) has 3.5 million Instagram followers and earns an estimated $15,400 every time she/it/they offer up a sponsored post.
- The biggest AI influencer on TikTok is Nobody Sausage. Hardly nobody, though, because it has 22.1 million followers.
Oh, dear.
