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AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans::Brands are turning to hyper-realistic, AI-generated influencers for promotions.
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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.
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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.
It’ll be a good while before an AI generates an Oscar-winning script or a whole movie but most movies and TV shows are very formulaic. Would it really be that surprising if AIs were generating the entertainment equivalent of Hannah Montana in a few years? Or the latest Hallmark Christmas special (LOL)?
My guess is five years: That’s how long it’ll be before we start getting a flood of half-decent AI-generated shows/movies. Where the script is good but the animation/video are “a little off”.
I mean, come on: There’s so many successful TV shows and movies that are total shit! You think AI can’t do better with just the tiniest bit of evolutionary improvements (and better hardware)?
Edit: I expect AI videos to be a revolution! Where we finally break free from the Hollywood and “big mega” cookie cutter stories. It’ll give creative people the power to make the movies they want without heavy-handed censorship and executives that require everything dumbed down for the lowest common viewer.
Are there actual original ideas coming out of these networks?
I mean yeah, far more than are coming out of Marvel, Disney and Hollywood in general.
(tbf that’s not a really high bar. These companies ask writers to NOT take any risk with their writing so to not “rock the boat” so to speak)
People who won the genetic lottery are angry that they can’t milk their attractive appearence for money anymore.
Well, that’s too bad.
Good. Fuck anyone who treats ‘influencing’ as a career.
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.
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.
Wait, are we supposed to think of influencers as humans?
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
If your job is easy, then it’ll probably get replaced with AI eventually. What’s easier than being an influencer?
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.
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.
Clearly you haven’t spent 3 minutes playing with StableDiffusion. AI has already plumbed the depths of human awfulness.
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?
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???
TL;DR - 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.
I mean yeah it is heartbreaking how artists are going to be FURTHER devalued in society 🙃
I don’t see the downside to this in particular.
It’s not AI stealing the business from humans. It’s men stealing the business from women
Do you think women are too stupid to use AI image generators or something? Fuck off with that 1950s attitude.
A good chunk of influencer women? Probably, but id say the same for their male counterparts.
No. But just look how things are. It’s how today’s society is, and it’s not going to change if you forbid observing it. Right now, most camera users are female and most AI users are male. So you fuck off
It’s alright, I get it. You have a very sexist mindset and think using image generators is a man’s job. Sitting around and looking pretty is a woman’s job.
Grow up.
The men AI are stealing all the women AI jobs!
“Stealing” business…?
AI is stealing the job of immigrants, being blamed for stealing jobs!
They terk er jobs!
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.
It’s generous to call influencers human.
I chuckled at this but I would like to point out that we shouldn’t dehumanize influencers. They are just as human as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
Wait…
Oh no, those poor influencers … anyway …
Better than AI influencers
How so?
I think that’s a true unpopular opinion there. Not bad, not bad at all.
Thanks, I’ll not be here all day
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
In what way?
Coz influencers can be people lucking into it, with AI influencers it’s mostly going to be brands cutting out the middlemen and making more money and reducing any chance of people receiving consequences of their actions as they can just delete that AI influencer and create a new one, whereas any human influencer will suffer the consequences even if very little for their actions
What makes you think they can’t (and don’t) just fire a human influencer and hire a new one whenever they feel like it now?
I did expect that, still better than AI influencers no? Even if by a tiny bit.
Your anti-AI prejudice is showing.
I’ll remember to take your words into consideration SatansMaggotyCumFart
Right cuz blaming lobbyists and ad campaigns… that’s totally worked out for tobacco, guns, pharma and vehicle companies looking to shirk any accountability.
Whoah there: Who says AI influencers aren’t the result of individual’s honest work? You don’t need an entire data center of computers to make your own AI influencer!
Don’t assume there’s a corporation behind every AI persona. It could just be one guy with a lot of VRAM getting creative with prompts in his parent’s basement.
Well they are products of the tech industry, so they are inherently not honest or ethical.
Ah yes. Like that damn internet and those cursed devices people use to access it. Anyone using those is inherently not honest or ethical.
The internet is the worst mistake in human history. I’m surprised you’d use that as your example.
First they came for the influencers, and I did not speak out, because I’m not an influencer…
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.
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.
Damn, what a shame, those poor poor influencers
maybe they need to get an actual job now?
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.
Whew. Skynet distracted itself from killing all humans.
AI recursive horny jail will save us all
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.
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.
Karl Marx predicted this more than a hundred years 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.
The technology itself may be very interesting and it may not be ultimately the core of the problem, but because there is no attempt to address the problems that arise as its use is spread, it can’t help but harm our society. Consider how companies may forgo hiring people to use AI to replace them, which threatens not only influencers but anyone working with writing, visual arts, voice work and consequently communication and service. How it can be used manipulatively to exploit people at a rate never seen before. As many amazing uses there may be for it, there are just as many terrible possibilites.
Meanwhile the average person cannot do much with it beyond using it as a toy, really.
Ultimately the real problem is the system, but as the system refuses to change we are in a collision course. There are calls to ban AI, but that is not the ideal solution, and I don’t think it can be done in any case. But we are not having the societal changes direly needed to be able to embrace it and end up with a better world. Sure it will bring massive profits to all sorts of business and industries, but that most likely will come at direct expense of people’s livelihoods. Can we even trust the scientific and industrial uses when financial interests direct them in such a way that products are intentionally sabotaged to be less functional and durable, or even which believes “curing diseases is not a sufficiently profitable model”?
These days I just dread the future…
Since the forces that determine policy are largely tied up with corporate profit, promoting the interests of domestic companies against those of other states, and access to resources and markets, our system will misuse AI technology whenever and wherever those imperatives conflict with the wider social good. As is the case with any technology, really.
Even if “banning” AI were possible as a protectionist measure for those in white-collar and artistic professions, I think it would ultimately be unfavorable with the ruling classes, since it would concede ground to rival geopolitical blocs who are in a kind of arms race to develop the technology. My personal prediction is that people in those industries will just have to roll with the punches and accept AI encroaching into their space. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, if society made the appropriate accommodations to retrain them and/or otherwise redistribute the dividends of this technological progress. But that’s probably wishful thinking.
To me, one of the most worrying trends, as it’s gained popularity in the public consciousness over the last year or two, has been the tendency to silo technologies within large companies, and build “moats” to protect it. What was once an open and vibrant community, with strong principles of sharing models, data, code, and peer-reviewed papers full of implementation details, is increasingly tending towards closed-source productized software, with the occasional vague “technical report” that reads like an advertising spiel. IMO one of the biggest things we can lobby for is openness and transparency in the field, to guard against the natural monopolies and perverse incentives of hoarding data, technical know-how, and compute power. Not to mention the positive externality spillovers of the open-source scientific community refining and developing new ideas.
It’s similar to how knowledge of the atomic structure gave us both the ability to destroy the world, or fuel it (relatively) cleanly. Knowledge itself is never a bad thing, only what we choose to do with it.
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 (~1-5 seconds an image, depending on size/quality settings) 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS (see the SVG chart in the middle of the page).
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.
Progress to something better or to self-destruction, 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.
Seems like people are all too eager for this to destroy the field of influencers as a whole, but that is extremely unlikely. If AI influencers don’t stick, the human ones will just keep at it as usual, but if it works, then it only becomes more artificial and manipulative. Say what you will about influencers, they don’t have the capability to tailor their ads to every single user, but AI could.
Betting on the whole of social media to disappear is wishful thinking, frankly. This genie won’t go back in the bottle. The human need for connections is too strong to simply drop it is not going to happen, and any substitute will need to fight uphill against very entrenched massive businesses that shaped it how it is today.
Human influences have always given me dystopian vibes. And they were just making some executives and themselves rich, is not such a big loss…
Human influencers are just celebrities at a smaller scale, and frankly the assumption that influencer/celebrity culture will go away if influencers are replaced I’m seeing in this thread is completely unrealistic. We will just get Coca-ColAIna and L’ÓreAI-chan instead of people occasionally peddling products.
If there’s any real concern of artificiality and parasocial following as a replacement for real human connections behind this disdain at influencers, then in no way replacing them with AI is going to fix anything. It will only make it worse. It will lead to custom-tailored indoctrination by brands.
Worse than that, I already see people treating actual artists much in the same way. That the human element in culture doesn’t matter as much as having an endless source of nebulous content, and that anyone making art should get a “real job” instead. Nevermind that those are also in line for automation…
‘Influencer’ as a job has only existed for what, 10 years? I don’t think society will collapse without them.
Influencers have a lot of overlap with artistic expression online, but this is not even all that it is about. This is not going to end simply with replacing Logan Paul and stopping at that. This is only one more step in a trend to replace a lot of creative, intellectual and service jobs. Which wouldn’t even be so bad if those people had a guarantee of a living and could do anything they want with their time… but this is not how it goes.
We couldn’t guarantee a living to all the people who had to go around picking up horse shit or lighting gas streetlamps either. Sure, a UBI would be nice, but technology advances. And I really do not believe it is a slippery slope from ending the career of Logan Paul to ending the career of a future Leonardo Da Vinci.
Back then we couldn’t guaranteed. But since productivity has grown immensely. We do grow more than enough food to feed every single person, and often that food it thrown out for a myriad of economic reasons. Technology advances but we see less and less of the benefits. It used to be at least that it freed us from manual labor into service work, but if it takes that too, then what?
You may not believe it all you want, artist are already seeing their careers diminishing in financial viability. Before we even could speculate about the threat to influencers, there were already visual artists and voice actors who gave up because their commissioners and employers decided to use AI instead. One might say “this means they weren’t very good so no loss”, but how does an artist get good if not practice? Nah, we aren’t sliding from ending Logan Paul to ending a prospective Leonardo Da Vinci, likely we already ruined the chances of that Da Vinci and now it’s sliding towards influencers.
And you know what, I don’t even think Logan Paul is going to lose his job considering how established he is. But some smaller, more integrous and creative influencers might.
Replacing influencers with ai is not going to fix anything for that we should dismantle social media and have a serious talk all 8 billion of us, but it’s not going to make anything worse either, it is already custom tailored indoctrination by brands and a handful of assholes are making stupid amounts of money. I’m not going to cry if that money shifts to different hands.
Yes artists come up often in this kind of discussions, the ones that are losing their job to ai never had one in the first place, same as influencers. What are we talking about, Jim that makes you a custom logo and business cards for your business?
The guy that gets a commission from the newly opened local microbrewery for graffiti-ing their walls is hardly losing any work to ai. If anything they could integrate ai in their creative process.
Good luck convincing 8 billion people all to agree on anything, especially to drop something that has become so enmeshed with people’s lives already.
But it is going to make it worse. All the data they are collecting from us will be directly funelled into how best to manipulate us in an individual manner. It is not custom tailored to a personal level yet. Even the most cynical and greedy influencer doesn’t have the means to individualize ads. But if it’s all AI-created, then it can be done.
Yes artists come up often in this kind of discussions, the ones that are losing their job to ai never had one in the first place
Nice No True Scotsman, sounds like you don’t really value their work, that anyone who could be replaced never deserved to earn a living to begin with. I don’t think there is anything I can respond to that, because at that point we have a fundamental conflict of values and worldview.
I believe artists, even small artists, deserve to be supported and that our world and culture is better off for that. Including Jim.
The guy that gets a commission from the newly opened local microbrewery for graffiti-ing their walls is hardly losing any work to ai.
That is, until a drone can physically print AI-created graffiti and replace that guy in the same way that the digital artists get replaced
If anything they could integrate ai in their creative process.
Assuming said artist even wants to do that, why would that business hire someone to use an AI if it could do it themselves? The benefit of AI is making content creation easier and faster. It’s not enough to say that “artists could just use it” because inevitably that makes it so less artists would be needed or hired for any given work. Say the graffitti artist manages to use said AI and drones and get by. Well, then it doesn’t need a team and apprentices anymore. And these won’t manage to do the same because the graffiti worked is already handled.
Ultimately, what is all this for? Rather than automation freeing us to have leisure and be creative, it’s freeing us to carry boxes in an Amazon warehouse.
“influencers” are more like models than celebrities… they add nothing
Do you really think models add nothing? Because that is a form of art too. If anything the comparison only serves to give some credit to influencers.
I’ll bite… what do models add?
What is there to “bite”? Photography would be a lot more limited without them. Fashion, whether you are into it or not, needs them. Traditional artists rely on them to learn. This is not even bringing up the more salacious side of it which, regardless if you think that is “worthy” or not, it’s enjoyed by a lot of people.
it’s not an art, it’s advertising…
Do you realize artistic photography uses models too? I mentioned it right below in this discussion.
Consider that maybe you associate modeling with advertisements because our society is more driven by marketing than culture.
