Lil Miquela, a 19-year-old girl from Los Angeles, is the new darling of fashion. She has accumulated more than 1.6 million followers worldwide since her debut on Instagram in 2016. Gucci, Chanel and other international brands are all partnering with her. Fashion is not her only specialty, she also worked on music creation, releasing more than seven singles on Spotify, with nearly 250,000 listeners a month. In 2018, she was even voted by Time magazine as the world’s 25 most influential online celebrities. But hey, she sounds just like any other influencers, right? What makes her so special? The thing is, Lil Miquela is not real.
Meet Lil Miquela, the most famous intelligent robot influencer on Instagram. The existence of Lil Miquela is pretty much like a large social experiment. Brud, the AI company that created Lil Miquela, merely provides her character settings and does not disclose further information. For example, Lil Miquela often accepts “media interviews” but the only way to contact her is via emails. People believe that the replies of Lil Miquela are her own AI computations, which serves as the evidence of her as an independent individual.
Lil Miquela’s increase in popularity corresponds with the public’s curiosity about whether robots have “humanity”. By looking at Lil Miquela’s Instagram account, we can see that Lil Miquela’s is attempting to blur the boundaries between virtual and real. She often takes photos with real-world celebrities and has also served as an interviewee in many videos. Upon closer examination, we can easily detect the unnaturalness of Lil Miquela, aka the AI computations. But still, people are confused about her and have been asking questions such as whether her voice is a real human being’s voice or does she has an AI brain and an AI vocal cord.
The existence of virtual influencers undoubtedly attracted opposing views. Advocates stated that having virtual influencers to endorse products is a safe choice. Just like real human celebrities, virtual influencers have fans as well. Moreover, virtual influencers won’t cause troubles such as alcohol and drug abuse which damage a company’s image. Opponents stated that virtual influencers will eventually replace real human celebrities.
As AI robots gradually enter the real world, how humans get along with machines has become an important issue in the contemporary era. The appearance of Lil Miquela is an opportunity for us to examine this issue carefully. What are your thoughts on virtual influencers? I personally think it is creepy. Does this mean our days of following and stalking influencers everywhere are over?
Sources:
https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18200509/ai-virtual-creators-lil-miquela-instagram-artificial-intelligence
https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/lil-miquela-digital-avatar-instagram-influencer.html
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-21/miquela-sousa-instagram-famous-influencer-cgi-ai/9767932
In my opinion the rise of AI influencers is quite unsettling. The AI takes out all of the human experience and emotion in a social media post. However, Lil Miquela may be a good business party for many different reasons. According marketing-interactive.com, Lil Maquela can be a perfect brand ambassador. Since she is made by AI, she is without human flaws. She always has perfect hair, skin, makeup, clothes, and overall appearance. The brand signing her knows that she can always look perfect and will never have bad promotion due to a flaw. Also, brands can create their own perfect AI influencer that they control to perfectly represent their brand. Human influencers will have their own personality that may conflict with a company’s brands a little. With the AI influencer, a brand can eliminate the possibility of conflicting personalities and create the ultimate brand ambassador. While the idea of AI influencers completely replacing human influencers scares me, the business side of me is excited about how AI influencers can positively affect companies.
https://www.marketing-interactive.com/features/rise-of-ai-influencers-how-you-can-get-a-piece-of-this-pie/
This was such an interesting post! I didn’t know about the digital influencer before reading this post, so this is all new to me. I would imagine that this could eventually replace human influencers to save companies money on advertising in the long run, so I did further research to gauge the demand for this product. Lil Miquela’s Instagram has a 2.54% engagement rate, which equates to that of an average human influencer (Dowling). With that being said, why wouldn’t companies start using digital influencers?
I think this is a super interesting and emerging way for companies to advertise their products. However, it has also received a lot of backlash in the public eye. According to tubefilter.com, Calvin Klein released an ad “featuring supermodel Bella Hadid kissing Lil Miquela” (Dowling). This was a very controversial matter because the purpose of the ad was to support LGBTQ, but Calvin Klein didn’t use real people who could’ve benefitted from the payment of the position (Dowling). Other popular brands and celebrities have been spotted alongside of Lil Manuela, which raises the question of whether this will become a more popular form of advertising.
Dowling, Eleanor. “Is A.I. the Next Step for Influencer Marketing? Meet Lil Miquela.” Tubefilter, 15 October 2019, https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/10/15/ai-next-step-influencer-marketing-lil-miquela/. Accessed 27 October 2019.