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Comment by leifg | Hacker News Reader

I think this only works because of the novelty effect.

A big reason why influencers or any kind of celebrity are successful is because enough people aspire to be like them. That's pretty hard to achieve for an AI.

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I think vtubers are a counterpoint to that argument. There's a lot of virtual avatar type celebrities on internet platforms in particular and they have had fanbases for a while.

I also don't think people aspire to be like influencers in a 'real' sense. Influencers are hyperreal versions of something fans know they won't actually be, and in that sense artificial characters might even be more interesting.

Yes 'codemiko' looks like a good example of how the future will play out.

I don’t know anything about influencers but why would people want to follow (more than for fun) someone that is AI generated? I mean an INFLUENCEr would be someone I aspire to be like. So if i follow a marathon athlete I’d like to be like her, do the same exercises etc. that would be impossible to mimic with a virtual marathon runner.

Replace marathon with ‘coding’ or whatever hobby you have, and I’m sure you’ll find it weird as well

If virtual influencers are travelling and taking pictures of themselves at cool places, you can certainly visit those places too. If they take pictures of food (very influencer-y thing to do), you can visit that restaurant and eat that food.

> I mean an INFLUENCEr would be someone I aspire to be like.

It seems not necessary to be.

You're reinterpreting what "influencer" means. An influencer isn't someone who influences you to be like them. That's called "role model". An influencer is someone whose job is to influence your purchasing decisions.

Before it became a career, originally "influencer" was a marketing designation for a person who's well-connected within target market's social graph, and thus is the optimal target to hire or manipulate into peddling crap to their followers.

There's nothing here preventing virtual personas from being influencers too. Being a real person who can be emulated is an asset for an influencer, but it's not a necessity - it doesn't matter why people follow you, it matters that they do, and that they are vulnerable to you manipulating them. Having such a network of vulnerable followers is what makes an influencer valuable to sponsors.

Vtubers are a really interesting side phenomenon to this. I think part of the appeal of a vtuber is that it seems more fair and effort-based than an influencer -- as far as I can see, you can become a successful influencer with nothing but a pretty face and maybe some good photography/photo editing skills, but in the vtuber world 99% of your success is just your ability to make entertaining content. There are vtubers with janky homemade live2d rigs that manage to be successful despite that, and there are vtubers with beautiful models commissioned by well-known illustrators that remain fairly obscure because the talent behind them is mediocre.

Arguably we've come far enough that people would be fine with the idea of a completely virtual image projected to them.

I see it two-folds:

- the image influencers are projecting is already detached from most people's reality, they know it's faked but accept it as an ideal to tend towards. Just as we all know movies are full of VFX and 1 in a million charismatic actors that are horrible people IRL, but we still aspire to the projected image.

- having no human being directly attached to the persona means no scandal, no medical issues, no miserable life lived in the shadow of the spotlight and it's beneficial to both producers and viewers. You'll never have your idol smeared by tabloids because they kicked homeless people.

RE your second point, I think there will be scandals. They'll just be 100% scripted[0]. If there's one thing we've learned about the Internet over the past 30 years, it's that people crave drama. Owning a few talking heads on YouTube is good, but having them get into fight is even better - you have an excuse for a nearly infinite stream of reaction videos, reaction-to-reaction videos, apology videos, apology-questioning videos, meta-analysis videos, etc. Viewers binge this, and influencers (and their owners) swim in money.

[0] - Though I think it's safe to assume the big ones today are also scripted. For example, every now and then my wife stumbles on some video from the cosmetics space on YouTube, and holy shit, the makeup-peddling influencers there have been running an ongoing personal drama for some good 3 years now. It will probably last another 3 - viewers seem glued to their seats, and producers just enjoy the viewership and opportunity to peddle some more name-brand makeup.

You might be right, drama is core component to entertainment. Hopefully with virtual representation, we'll have more virtual trash talking and less stalking/doxxing/career destruction.

We're having a taste of that with vtubers, where there's a lot happening, in particular as the money amount moving around are already pretty big, but comparatively way less dire than with actual idols.

Heh. Reminds me when League of Legends introduced the character Seraphine as the new member of their virtual kpop group, with a whole twitter account about her "daily life" and stuff.

I remember reading one reddit comment that went "Can't wait for the moment Seraphine gets canceled for something she said in an interview and has to put out a tearful apology video. Gotta hit those real-life influence milestones!"

(of course Seraphine would never actually get canceled; that would require that her writers give her any amount of personality whatsoever)

Perhaps, but on the other hand something like Hatsune Miku has been around for over a decade and generated a little industry around itself. I don't know about this particular attempt but I wouldn't dismiss the idea as a whole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku

I don't think it is "to aspire to be like them", more of a "to aspire to be close to them". The same story for celebrities. You just want good things to those you spend time cherishing. It has nothing to do with whether you think it's real, fake, obtainable or not. BTS aren't popular because people want to be like them, they're popular because people want to be with them.

The males want to aspire to be a member and females to be close. You were both right.

I do think that the novelty effect will quickly wear off.

What is the future for 'virtual humans' after that? Will it be mainly virtual assistants (that people will quickly grow to hate)? Will they come to dominate pornography or say cam sites, and be tarred by that association and then end up ignored in other spheres? on the other hand, if they avoid that fate, they could gradually become a pretty significant force in mainstream film; i think getting popularity there will be a hard road to climb if people first associate them as tacky.

And unless these virtual personalities end up engaging in scripted dramas and celebrity feuds and things like the way (i gather) k-pop bands do etc, they risk people coming to find them extremely boring. Being able to be in more than one place at once is in some ways a disadvantage if it makes them so ever-present that their audience no longer experiences them as part of some kind of narrative, which is what lets people develop feelings for them.

> Will they come to dominate pornography or say cam sites

I mean, this already happened? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projekt_Melody

Remember how people used to say that our entertainment was going to become interactive - that movies and TV shows were going to become more like videogames? Well, it's happening, but from the opposite end.

The future looks like a hologram siri virtual assistant.

Agreed, though the title of this article is deeply misleading, there's no AI involved apparently (maybe they swapped CGI/AI for clicks?).

That changes the likelihood of this succeeding though, not only because it has been done before, but because influencers are already deeply artificial (no pun intended), and in the process of becoming successful having a near perfect control of your image through computers might help.

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