Technology

Oh no. People who use their good looks to push lifestyles that are unattainable are suffering the smallest bit of inconvenience. Oh no.

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

Oh no, fake people are stealing fake jobs from fake people!

Anyways..

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Damn, what a shame, those poor poor influencers

maybe they need to get an actual job now?

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

I hate influencers, aka living adverts

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

One step closer to the Dead Internet Theory becoming reality

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

I don't see the downside to this in particular.

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...

If everyone would just stop looking at influencers, they would go away.

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.

Wait, are we supposed to think of influencers as humans?

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.

"Stealing" business...?

I mean, someone like Hatsune Miku already existed before. It's just (slightly) more mainstream now. The only issue with "virtual influencers" is how straightforward the owners are in admitting that their product is AI.

I first saw pinky in the picture when on a post saying italian company tired of dealing with insufferable influencers so they just built their own.

Ill say the same thing now that I did then.

Reminds me of the novel Idoru by William Gibson. Worth a read, not sure how it holds up in this era though

They terk er jerbs

That's a business risk lmao

Would you look at that, another story where I hate everybody involved.