AI virtual influencers are no longer just an internet curiosity. They are now part of the same creator economy that human influencers depend on, and brands are paying for access to their audiences.
The shift is visible in the rise of Aitana Lopez, a pink-haired virtual influencer created with artificial intelligence tools by the Barcelona-based agency The Clueless. She is fictional, but her commercial impact is real: more than 200,000 people follow her on social media, and brands have paid about $1,000 a post for promotions.
Fictional creators are entering a real market
Aitana posts the kind of lifestyle content audiences already recognize from human creators, including selfies from concerts and her bedroom. Her posts have also tagged brands including hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret.
That blend of familiar influencer behavior and synthetic identity is the core of the new model. Aitana is one of hundreds of digital avatars that have entered the growing $21 billion content creator economy. For human influencers, that matters because brand budgets are finite. When a fictional account wins a campaign, a person may lose the same opportunity.
The concern fits a wider anxiety around generative AI. The same technology that can produce humanlike text, images and code in seconds is now being used to create personalities that look convincing enough to sell products. In the influencer business, that means the competitive threat is not only automation behind the scenes. It is automation on camera.
Why brands are interested
The business case is straightforward. Virtual influencers can draw attention, reduce costs and give brands more control over the final message. Those advantages are especially attractive in an industry where human talent can be expensive, unpredictable or tied to personal controversy.
Diana Núñez, co-founder of The Clueless, said the agency began with a cost question: “We were taken aback by the skyrocketing rates influencers charge nowadays. That got us thinking, ‘What if we just create our own influencer?’” She added: “The rest is history. We unintentionally created a monster. A beautiful one, though.”
The appeal is not limited to smaller experiments. Over the past few years, luxury brands have worked with virtual influencers, including Kim Kardashian’s make-up line KKW Beauty with Noonoouri, and Louis Vuitton with Ayayi.
There is also evidence that virtual influencers can perform well in some advertising contexts. Instagram analysis of an H&M advert featuring virtual influencer Kuki found that it reached 11 times more people and led to a 91 percent decrease in cost per person remembering the advert, compared with a traditional ad.
Becky Owen, global chief marketing and innovation officer at Billion Dollar Boy and former head of Meta’s creator innovations team, described the effect in more specific terms. “It is not influencing purchase like a human influencer would, but it is driving awareness, favourability and recall for the brand,” she said.
The disclosure problem
The most immediate trust issue is whether audiences know when an influencer is not real. Human creators argue that virtual counterparts should have to say clearly that they are artificial.
Danae Mercer, a content creator with more than 2 million followers, put the concern plainly: “What freaks me out about these influencers is how hard it is to tell they’re fake.”
The rules are uneven. The UK’s Advertising Standards Agency said it was “keenly aware of the rise of virtual influencers within this space” but said there was no rule where they must declare they are generated by AI. India, by contrast, is described as one country that forces virtual influencers to reveal their AI origins.
The Clueless discloses Aitana’s artificial identity with the hashtag #aimodel in her Instagram profile. But the source article says many others either do not disclose or use less direct labels such as #digitalinfluencer.
Even disclosure may not settle the issue if audiences do not notice it or do not understand it. Núñez said: “Even though we made it clear she was an AI-generated model . . . initially, most of her followers didn’t question her authenticity, they genuinely believed in her existence.” She also said Aitana has received multiple requests to meet followers in person.
Storytelling still needs people
Not every virtual influencer is a quick generative AI experiment. Lil Miquela, one of the first virtual influencers, charges up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for any given deal and has worked with Burberry, Prada and Givenchy. Her audience is nearly 3 million followers and ranges from the US to Asia and Latin America.
Although AI is used to generate content for Lil Miquela, the team behind her does not see technology alone as the full product. Ridhima Kahn, vice-president of business development at Dapper Labs, who oversees Lil Miquela’s partnerships, said the team “strongly believe [the storytelling behind virtual creators] cannot be fully replicated by generative AI.”
She also warned against low-effort launches. “A lot of companies are coming out with virtual influencers they have generated in a day, and they are not really putting that human element [into the messaging] . . . and I don’t think that is going to be the long-term strategy,” she said.
That point is important for brands. A synthetic face may be easy to generate, but a sustained audience relationship still depends on consistency, character and a sense that something meaningful is being communicated. The source article suggests that the strongest virtual influencer businesses are not only image-generation projects. They are managed media properties.
Representation, control and profit
Virtual influencers also raise harder questions about identity. Lil Miquela is considered by many to be mixed race. The Clueless has another creation in development, which it calls a “curvy Mexican” named Laila.
Francesca Sobande, a senior lecturer in digital media studies at Cardiff University, has researched virtual influencers with racially ambiguous features. She suggests that some of these characteristics can be “simply another form of marketing” used to reach a broader audience when “something has been created with a focus on profit.”
Sobande said this “can be very convenient for brands wanting to identify global marketing strategies and trying to project a hollow image that might be perceived as progressive,” and added that “seldom does it seem to be black people” creating the virtual avatars.
Dapper Labs emphasized that the team behind Lil Miquela is diverse and reflects her audience. The Clueless said its creations were designed to “foster inclusivity and provide opportunities to collectives that have faced exclusion for an extended period.”
Another criticism is sexualisation. The Clueless’s creations, among other virtual influencers, have been criticized for being overly sexualised, with Aitana regularly appearing in underwear. The agency said sexualisation is “prevalent with real models and influencers” and that its creations “merely mirror these established practices without deviating from the current norms in the industry.”
Mercer sees a different problem. She argued that women have used platforms such as OnlyFans and social media to regain some agency over how they profit from their bodies. AI-generated female creations, often made by men, could shift that money and control away again. “That is the reason behind growing these accounts. It is to make money,” she said.
The result is a creator economy tension that is not going away. AI virtual influencers can be cheaper, controllable and commercially effective. But their rise also forces brands, platforms and audiences to decide how much transparency, human authorship and real personal agency should matter in online influence.