Virtual influencers are burning up South Koreans’ Instagram feeds
Virtual influencers are burning up South Koreans’ Instagram feeds
They are cheap to hire, always look great and they don’t bully their colleagues
I'm not completely against AI but this shit makes me wish we went back to monke.
She is perhaps best-known for an advert for an insurance company in which she danced across the rooftops of Seoul.
We really are living in a Cyberpunk dystopia
Apart from being cheaper, virtual celebrities have other advantages over human ones. “They don’t complain” and firms “don’t have to worry about them ruining their reputation”, says Kim Sang-kyun from Kangwon National University in Gangwon province.
these virtual influences vtubers etc are the logical conclusion of what that role is anyway. exceedingly fake and plastic, a spectacle for people to gawk at. who cares if it's literally virtual from front to back, 'real' influences or streamers are performing a role anyway, they can't be their true selves, nothing about any of what they do is real or meaningful
Yea, human influencers were already extremely fake af.
Idoru (William Gibson, 1996). Jpst another case of tech bros building the Torment Nexus.
We've got AI influencers to pair up with all those bot accounts inflating activity on the platforms. Then we've got marketing departments dedicated to following the trends created by AI influencers interacting with bot accounts, but we're replacing those teams with LLMs. So, eventually, it'll just be a black hole of spending, where we pay people to operate a big machine labeled "AI" that simulates popular culture.
The real danger of this fishbowl of mass media is that people fixate on it and lose sight of their own material conditions. But as more and more resources go into maintaining the fishbowl, everyone else's lives fall farther and farther away from the surreal glamour of the online phantasms. Because its all artificial, it isn't even clear how many people are engaging with these things. Just illusion stacked on illusion, until a big enough reality comes smashing through.
God, South Korea sucks sooooo bad. My girlfriend is obsessed with SK TV shows and they are all so overwhelmingly fake and false. This bullshit seems par for the course.
This is the natural evolution of
I don't understand why anyone would follow this sort of account. The account clearly says that it's a virtual influencer so they are not using underhanded tricks here.
i hope there'll be blowback from flooding the world with AI influencers. i hope people just tune them all out en-masse.
but... what if this shit keeps working?
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Site wants to feed me cookies but still puts the article behind a paywall. Fuck the economist here’s an archive link