Instagram influencers, watch out: AI is already coming for your jobs

• AI influencers may be taking work away from human influencers, the FT reported.
• Virtual influencers — who look like real people — are striking six-figure deals with luxury brands.

AI seems to be coming for the $250 billion creator economy as companies start to build computer-generated influencers.

Take Aitana López, an AI influencer with more than 243,000 followers on Instagram. She earns up to $11,000 a month, and gets paid $1,000 per post to advertise products from brands like lingerie retailer Victoria's Secret and haircare line Olaplex despite not being a human, according to the Financial Times.

Or Lil Miquela, one of the first virtual influencers to hit the market, who has struck deals worth well over six figures with high-end brands, per the FT. She has worked with Prada and Calvin Klein, as well as tech companies like Samsung and YouTube.

Or indeed Noonoouri, an AI influencer with over 400,000 followers on Instagram, which worked with Kim Kardashian's cosmetic line KKW Beauty, according to the FT.

All these virtual influencers (and the companies behind them) may be taking paid gigs away from actual humans. And that's leaving those people who make a living off promoting products to their social media followers feeling the heat.

One main reason for brands to strike deals with virtual influencers: An attempt to cut costs and increase visibility.

"We were taken aback by the skyrocketing rates influencers charge nowadays," Diana Núñez, cofounder of The Clueless, the AI modeling agency behind López, told the FT. The steep rates for human influencers, she said, is what inspired her company to create its own influencer.

And it's seemingly eyecatching, too. Instagram analysis of an ad featuring Kuki, an AI influencer who worked with H&M, found that it reached 11 times more people across the social platform compared to the reach of a traditional ad, the FT reported. That translates to a 91% decrease in cost per person remembering the advert.

In response to the trend, some (human) influencers have expressed concerns that their AI competitors will be mistaken for real people, given their uncanny resemblance.

"What freaks me out about these influencers is how hard it is to tell they're fake," Danae Mercer, a creator with more than 2 million followers on Instagram, told the FT.

And despite AI's potential for cheaper marketing, the firms behind AI influencers also appear to be grappling with the ethics around their creations.

"We unintentionally created a monster. A beautiful one, though," Núñez at The Clueless told the FT. The cofounder of the AI modeling agency didn't immediately respond to BI's request for comment.

The potential tension between human and AI influencers is another example of the ongoing fear that AI will replace workers as the technology's capabilities become more advanced.

A Goldman Sachs study published earlier this year found that generative AI may come for more than 300 million white-collar jobs around the world. Workers have used AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT to write code, create real estate listings, and generate marketing copy.

But despite the fears around job replacement, influencers are, in fact, using the tech to help streamline their day-to-day content creation. In a May report, the Influencer Marketing Factory surveyed 660 US-based creators and found that 94.5% of them use AI to edit content and generate images.