These two influencers succeed

In some ways, Gigi is like any other young social media influencer.

With perfect hair and makeup, she goes online and talks to her fans. She shares clips: eating, doing skincare, putting on lipstick. She even has a cute baby who appears in some videos.

But after a few seconds, something might seem a little weird.

She can munch on pizza made from molten lava or apply snowflakes and cotton candy as lip gloss. Her hands sometimes pass through what she is holding.

It’s because Gigi isn’t real. She is the AI ​​creation of Simone Mckenzie, a student at the University of Illinois, who needed to earn some money over the summer.

Ms. Mckenzie, 21, is part of a rapidly growing cohort of digital creators who produce a stream of videos by typing simple prompts into AI chatbots, like Google Veo 3. Experts say the genre, dubbed “AI slop” by some critics and reluctant viewers, is taking over social media feeds.

And its creators are enjoying considerable success.

“One video made me $1,600 [£1,185] in just four days,” Ms. Mckenzie said. “I thought, OK, let me keep doing this.”

After two months, Gigi had millions of views, which allowed Ms. Mckenzie to earn thousands through TikTok’s creator fund, a program that pays creators based on the number of views they get. But she’s far from the only person using AI to achieve easy virality, experts say.

“It’s increasing right now and it’s probably going to continue,” said Jessa Lingel, an associate professor and digital culture expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

Its ancestors – who can now generate videos of anything in just minutes – have the potential to disrupt the lucrative influencer economy.

But while some say AI is ruining social media, others see its potential to democratize those who gain fame online, Lingel said. Those who don’t have the money or time for a fancy background, camera setup or video editing tools can now go viral too.

Only recently has social media influencing become a legitimate career path. But in just a few years, the sector has grown to a value of more than $250 billion, according to investment firm Goldman Sachs. Online creators often use their own lives – their vacations, their pets, their makeup routines – to create content and attract followers.

AI creators capable of creating the same thing, but faster, cheaper and without the constraints of reality.

“It definitely has the potential to shake up the creator space,” said Brooke Duffy, a digital and social media specialist at Cornell University.

Gigi creator Ms Mckenzie said creating videos only took her a few minutes and she sometimes posted three a day.

This is not feasible for human influencers like 26-year-old Kaaviya Sambasivam, who has around 1.3 million followers across multiple platforms.

Depending on the type of video she’s making — whether it’s a recipe, a day in my life vlog, or a makeup tutorial — the entire production can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. She has to shop, plan, set up her background and lighting, film and then edit.

AI creators can skip almost all of these steps.

“It begs the question: Is this going to be something that we can compete with? Because I’m a human. My production is limited,” said Ms. Sambasivam, based in North Carolina. “There are months where I’ll be in the trash, and I’ll only post the bare minimum. I can’t compete with the robots.”

She began creating her channel while living with her parents during the Covid pandemic. Without installation, she said she taped her phone to the wall to film. Eventually, she spent the money she earned as an influencer on tripods, lighting, makeup, and food for her videos. It took years to build his clientele.

Ms Mckenzie said she considered becoming a more traditional influencer, but didn’t have the money, time or set-up. That’s why she created Gigi.

“My home office has a lot of books and stuff,” she said. “It’s not the most visually appealing. It’s certainly easier to be able to choose any background you want with AI.”

When Ms Mckenzie started, she turned to Google’s Veo 3 chatbot, asking it to generate a woman – someone to replace her.

Gigi is her age, 21, with tan skin, green eyes, freckles, winged eyeliner, and long black hair. She then asked the chatbot to make Gigi speak. Gigi now starts every video by berating commenters who accuse her of being an AI. Then, mockingly agreeing with them, she eats a dazzled avocado or a cookie made of slime.

Ms Duffy said digital modifications are not new. First, there were programs like Photoshop, used for image editing. Then, apps like FaceTune made it easier for users to change their faces for social media. But she said the main precursor to today’s hyper-realistic AI videos were celebrity deepfakes, which emerged in the late 2010s.

But they now seem much more real, Ms. Duffy said, and they can spread more quickly.

AI videos run the gamut from the absurd — a caricature of a cat working at McDonald’s — to the hyperreal, like fake doorbell camera footage. They represent all genres: horror, comedy, culinary. But none of this is real.

“It’s become, in a way, a form of meme culture,” Ms. Duffy said.

A 31-year-old American woman living in South Korea has a TikTok page dedicated to an AI-generated puppy, Gamja, who wears headphones, cooks and curls her hair. She has received millions of views as well as partnerships from companies who want to be featured in her videos.

“I wanted to mix things that people love, including food and puppies, in a way that hadn’t been done before,” she said.

One of the biggest AI content creators on TikTok is 27-year-old Daniel Riley. He has millions of viewers, but they have never seen his face. On the contrary, his “time travel” videos have earned him nearly 600,000 subscribers and tens of millions of views.

“POV: You Wake Up in Pompeii on the Day of the Eruption” and “POV: You Wake Up as Queen Cleopatra” are some of its most popular titles, taking viewers through a fictional 30-second day in ancient history.

“I realized I could tell stories that would normally cost millions to produce and give people a glimpse of different eras through their phones,” he said.

And he developed another revenue stream: a bootcamp to teach others how to create similar AI videos for a monthly fee.

“Stop calling me AI,” Gigi says at the start of every TikTok. She argues with the skeptics – but some viewers undoubtedly believe she’s real.

On the one hand, AI videos that are almost indistinguishable from reality pose a real problem, Ms. Lingel said, especially for young children who are not yet media literate.

“I think it will soon be almost impossible for an ordinary human to tell the difference,” she said. “You’re going to see an increase in misinformation, you’re going to see an increase in scams, you’re going to see an increase in content that is just… crap.”

On the other hand, AI videos can be fascinating, experts say, by offering cartoonish and exaggerated material.

“It’s these images and messages that seem to walk the line between reality and duplicity that capture our attention and encourage us to share,” Ms. Duffy said.

A Harvard University study indicated that among AI users aged 14 to 22, many report using it to generate things like images and music.

Still, she says, the question is whether human discernment can keep up with rapidly changing technology.

Almost every day, the Gamja creator says she hears from people online worried about her AI-generated puppy: They think he’s eating unhealthy food, they say — because they think they’re watching a real dog.