AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans::Brands are turning to hyper-realistic, AI-generated influencers for promotions.
That makes sense. The goal always seemed to be as fake as possible.
AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans
Submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/12/ai-created-virtual-influencers-are-stealing-business-from-humans/
Comments
recapitated@lemmy.world 10 months ago
redditReallySucks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Oh no, those poor influencers … anyway …
SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Better than AI influencers
systemglitch@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think that’s a true unpopular opinion there. Not bad, not bad at all.
Kbobabob@lemmy.world 10 months ago
How so?
redditReallySucks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
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
the_ocs@lemmy.world 10 months ago
First they came for the influencers, and I did not speak out, because I’m not an influencer…
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Give them some talent and they’re essentially movie actors. It’s just another form of entertainment and as little as I care about influencers this won’t stop with them. Anyone that appears on camera is fair game to be replaced.
BluesF@lemmy.world 10 months ago
There are some things I won’t be disappointed to see replaced by automation. Transitions are not well managed in this regard (retraining is expensive after all), but many jobs I feel should be automated because they suck. Not really sure where influencers fall on this scale… Can’t imagine it’s great for your mental health.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Oh no, fake people are stealing jobs from fake people!
Anyways…
phoneymouse@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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 ratios to be an instagram model anymore. Anyone can! Seems like true equality to me.
topinambour_rex@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You just need to be a geek who can afford some 4090 and the software which produce the pretty lady.
Nudding@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah let’s do this instead of banning predatory advertising lol.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
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.
We are fairly far into the predicted cyberpunk dystopia now.
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.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
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.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
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.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Smoogs@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Whew. Skynet distracted itself from killing all humans.
CH3DD4R_G0BL1N@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
AI recursive horny jail will save us all
xkforce@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Guess they’ll have to get a real job now.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well, the real jobs are going to AI too
clearleaf@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Are there any that are real in the sense that they contribute something of value to society?
halm@leminal.space 10 months ago
Let’s define “stealing” and “business” here.
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Influencers don’t produce anything, nor do they add intrinsic value to products they promote. Not much business to that if you ask me.
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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.
cjsolx@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The only problem I have with that is the notion that a company gets to consolidate funds that were previously going to an actual real person. Now, if we could rely on big business to pass on those savings to their customers and employees, that would be one thing. But we can’t.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Gimme my money for nothing, and comps for free. (Paraphrased)
halm@leminal.space 10 months ago
At least move those microwave ovens, refrigerators and colour tee-vees to earn your wage.
FlaminGoku@reddthat.com 10 months ago
Got some installed LLM models, custom skins, simulated memories We’ve got your convo… generated (We’ve got artificial personalities)
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Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
If your job is easy, then it’ll probably get replaced with AI eventually. What’s easier than being an influencer?
tinkeringidiot@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If you only do the easy part, then yes that’s infinitely replaceable. Being a pretty face is exactly that, and AI can do that all day long.
Being actually entertaining and engaging, though, is a different story, and AI is struggling to pick that up. And of course teams of corporate marketers continually fail at this.
But yes, the “job” of “being attractive on the internet” can now be outsourced to machines.
BigPotato@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Right, but for corporations once you mention the lack of risk that your AI influencer will rape some kids or turn out to be something equally horrible the equation becomes infinitely skewed in the AI’s favor.
So, what I’m saying is, rule34 people gotta get to work making all those AI do horrible things and we’ll be back to expecting our brand shills to have a heartbeat.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
AI is improving by leaps and bounds. I’ve fiddled with Stable Diffusion for over a year and I’ve seen it go from mostly random, highly deformed, blurry Polaroid quality images to high def, lifelike, in almost any pose imaginable images. And the same improvement goes for non-photo quality images too. Highly-skilled illustrators with degrees are mostly fucked. This whole “but I’m so much more efficient” argument doesn’t hold water in our economy. Producing 3X more doesn’t mean people consume 3X more, it means you’re 3X overstaffed.
Now for streamers and influencers I’ll admit some of them have cardboard personalities and are easily replaced. Someone like JSE (I don’t watch much so sorry if my references are dated) is a little more animated than average so that’s gonna be harder to replicate, but does it need to be replicated in order to steal views? Jack is one man and he can’t stream 24x7 and many would prefer an “always on” streamer to someone with better content but available intermittently.
Hell, look at Amazon. It used to be filled with name brand products that you could rely upon because reputations were at stake. Now it’s an endless sea of cloned and relabeled products that are between decent and total crap, but is that hurting Amazon’s bottom line? Nope. The stuff is crap but it’s cheap, readily available, and it arrives in 24 hours. Who needs quality???
In short, AI doesn’t need to be good, it needs to be good enough, and when it breaches that threshold you’ll see quality content creators go into overdrive to keep up or pack it in because the effort is no longer worth the payout.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I mean yeah it is heartbreaking how artists are going to be FURTHER devalued in society 🙃
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 months ago
So much of the job is face tuned and post-productioned anyway. And what are you even doing? Unboxing videos? Soy face in front of a sports car or a machine gun?
The real job of the modern influencer isn’t sitting in front of a camera. It’s all the SEO and brown nosing and cross-posting to raise your brand profile.
In a media economy where everything is online is it any wonder that an AI video in a feedback loop with a bunch of AI controlled bot “users” is going to max out on a platform that only knows how to reward these artificially manipulated metrics?
Mandy@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Damn, what a shame, those poor poor influencers
maybe they need to get an actual job now?
brsrklf@jlai.lu 10 months ago
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.
quo@feddit.uk 10 months ago
[deleted]brsrklf@jlai.lu 10 months ago
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.
Tangent5280@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Are there actual original ideas coming out of these networks?
crsu@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I hate influencers, aka living adverts
ericisshort@lemmy.world 10 months ago
“First they came for the influencers, and I said nothing…”
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Because fuck em.
clearleaf@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Can’t you see us insulting them? We said a lot as we watched them descend into a dark hole never to return.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Forgive me for being entirely unsympathetic, but I would not call being an “influencer” a “job”.
Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Even as a job it’s highly overpaid. Hardly any “work” or “skill” involved yet makes millions in some cases.
NBJack@reddthat.com 10 months ago
Rarely, TBH. Unless you’re OK with being an absolute ass in some form or another.
iamtherealwalrus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The same could be said about a lot of sources of income. It’s subjective what is considered a job.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It is a.job, just a ridiculously stupid one
DingoBilly@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Vibi@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
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.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 10 months ago
And nothing of value was lost.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
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.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Human beauty is harassing restaurant owners for free food in exchange for exposure
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 10 months ago
insider.com/australian-influencers-slammed-for-as…
Go ahead and be an apologist for this
chitak166@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Good. Fuck anyone who treats ‘influencing’ as a career.
SpookyUnderwear@eviltoast.org 10 months ago
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.
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
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.
wheeldawg@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I don’t see the downside to this in particular.
AgentGrimstone@lemmy.world 10 months ago
One step closer to the Dead Internet Theory becoming reality
Huschke@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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”
wikibot@lemmy.world [bot] 10 months ago
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.rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
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.
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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…
banneryear1868@lemmy.world 10 months ago
People’s identities become fully commodified then a technology is invented to simulate it. Late stage capitalist dystopia things.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 10 months ago
If everyone would just stop looking at influencers, they would go away.
Klear@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
0x0001@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
They terk er jerbs
Aicse@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
SkippingRelax@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Human influences have always given me dystopian vibes. And they were just making some executives and themselves rich, is not such a big loss…
Barack_Embalmer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
riskable@programming.dev 10 months ago
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 (~5-10 seconds an image) 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: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS (see the SVG chart in the middle of the page).
Aicse@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Progress to something better or to self district. 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.
exocrinous@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Karl Marx predicted this more than a hundred years ago
TheBiscuitLout@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Wait, are we supposed to think of influencers as humans?
Custoslibera@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s generous to call influencers human.
riskable@programming.dev 10 months ago
I chuckled at this but I would like to point out that we shouldn’t dehumanize influencers. They’re are just as human as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
Wait…
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
“Stealing” business…?
riskable@programming.dev 10 months ago
AI is stealing the job of immigrants, being blamed for stealing jobs!
just_another_person@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ohhh no…Logan Paul will need to learn a discernable skill of some sort.
ryper@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
He’s gotten into wrestling for WWE, and he’s actually pretty good at it. He’s probably getting paid pretty well there.
baatliwala@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
21Cabbage@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
Would you look at that, another story where I hate everybody involved.
jaamesbaxterr@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I would imagine the money still goes to humans, yeah? Lol
the_q@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Oh no. People who use their good looks to push lifestyles that are unattainable are suffering the smallest bit of inconvenience. Oh no.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch honestly
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
Web designers?
Paddzr@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Or they’re just not good enough and there are prettier ones out there? God forbis Rachel’s only fans isn’t top because maybe she’s not that good at showing her pussy? Like anything in life, competition is a bitch.
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
Liking somebody for looks and such behavior only is not worse or better than disliking somebody for looks and such behavior only.
the_q@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ok?