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AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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This seems like a short term problem.
If marketing agencies move to AI influencers, the consumer will slowly catch on and move away from it.
Why?
People like influencers because they want to emulate their style and want essentially word of mouth recommendations on things. There's an element of cognitive dissonance to recognizing they're just a different form of advertising, and I would think that once that loses its human element, that won't be as appealing to consumers who enjoy influencers.
Everybody so afraid of IA turns out it can heal us. Hopefully more people will realize the absurdity of an influencer instead of just trending from AI influencer to “let’s go back to analog human influencers like in the old day”.
The loss of influencers more than makes up for the loss of photographers, newscasters, models, translators, and writers.
/s
Every job I mentioned isn't speculation. Some of those have already been replaced by AI.
Same happened with every other piece of technology so far. Labour will continue to be replaced by machines. It’s up to us to live from the tools and not for them.
Refrigerators displaced milkmen, cars displaced carriage builders and horse farriers, and other various tools displaced manual laborers. Adoption of these advancements was slow and people often had time to upskill to something else, maybe in the technology that displaced them.
With AI we're talking a massive displacement across the entirety of our economy. Teachers, actors, lawyers, accountants, programmers, chemists, therapists, writers, illustrators, and many more professions could be on the chopping block within a few years. Can all of these people get a job in data science? Ironically, I think the safest jobs (until AI robotics catches up) will be in the trades, one of the main things college goers are trying to avoid. Again, there are only so many toilets.
You have a point. But one could equally well predict that influencers - or celebrities in general - lose their appeal once people understand that they are not really their friends. The neurotypical mind simply seems not to be wired that way.
I don't understand your comment, especially the last sentence. Who thinks that celebrities are their friends?
Not sure if "friend" is quite the right word, but parasocial interaction is extremely common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
I guess it's answered. On some level, our brain decides that some perfect strangers are friends or family. How else would one explain that we follow gossip about the lives and relationships of people that we, almost certainly, will never meet?
It seems reasonable to me that you could admire somebody without thinking that they're a friend or family. That's what being a fan is. Some of the more extreme fans are going to want to know intimate details about the object of their admiration. I don't see how it's different from any other obsessive hobbyist.
That's probably true in some contexts. But how many, EG, Raspberry Pi enthusiasts know the name of the senior engineer, let alone their relationship status?
I'm sure you can admire someone's music or writing without caring one bit about their personal life. But I don't think you could say the same about an actor. What's more important for your life: movies or smartphones? So why do we know the names of so many actors but not scientists or engineers?
Despite the label, neurotypicals are not all the same.
Don't make fun of the NTs, if nothing else we need someone who can deal with air compressor noises.
The fact people watch influencers gives me no hope they wouldn't react similarly to an AI influencer. I haven't heard of any law that requires content creators to mention the use of AI and if there was such a law it would probably get fulfilled by a microscopic blurp at the bottom of the page that nobody reads.
I think you are underestimating the cognitive dissonance of most consumers.