It began quietly, as these things often do.
A flawless face appears on Instagram, smiling beside a latte that never went cold. The caption was warm, friendly, oddly precise. A few thousand likes followed. Then a few hundred thousand. At some point, someone notices the influencer never ages, never stumbles over words, never had an off day. She is not real, at least not in the conventional sense. And yet she is influential.
AI influencers are no longer a novelty act wheeled out at conferences to provoke a gasp. They are signing brand deals, fronting campaigns, and building followings that would make human creators grind their teeth in envy. The obvious question follows. Is this better, worse, or simply different from what came before?
The answer, inconveniently, is all three.
When Artificial Becomes Advantageous
There is something undeniably efficient about an influencer who never oversleeps and never asks for a revised brief. AI influencers are always on brand because they are the brand. Their tone of voice does not drift with mood or personal circumstance. They do not wake up one morning and decide that protein shakes no longer align with their values.
For brands, this level of control is intoxicating. Campaigns can be planned months in advance with forensic precision. Content can be localised, translated, tweaked and optimised without the awkward back and forth that often accompanies human collaboration. If a post underperforms, it can be quietly adjusted, reposted, or retired without bruised egos or awkward phone calls.
There is also the matter of scale. An AI influencer can exist in multiple places at once, speaking different languages, inhabiting different cultural cues, and appearing across platforms with perfect consistency. A human creator might manage three channels before burnout sets in. An artificial one can manage thirty before breakfast.
From a creative standpoint, there is a strange freedom too. AI influencers are not bound by physical reality. They can wear impossible outfits, appear in fantastical locations, or collaborate with historical figures without anyone needing a passport or a time machine. For fashion, gaming, and digital-first brands, this opens a playful, often visually striking territory that traditional influencer marketing struggles to reach.
There is also a quieter benefit that rarely makes the headlines. AI influencers do not court scandal in the traditional sense. They do not tweet something ill-judged at midnight or become embroiled in messy personal disputes. In a media environment that thrives on outrage, this predictability can feel like a safe harbour.
The Uneasy Side of Perfection
And yet, perfection has a habit of curdling.
One of the more troubling aspects of AI influencers is the way they flatten human experience. Influencer culture already has a reputation for selling an airbrushed version of life. AI simply removes the remaining smudges. These figures do not struggle, age, or falter unless scripted to do so. When they speak about wellness, success, or self confidence, it can feel oddly hollow, like being lectured on swimming by a particularly articulate buoy.
There is also the question of labour. Human influencers, for all their carefully curated feeds, are workers. They negotiate, create, perform, and adapt. AI influencers, by contrast, are assets. Their rise raises uncomfortable questions about who gets paid, who gets replaced, and who quietly disappears from the industry altogether. For every brand choosing a synthetic spokesperson, there is a human creator who never gets the email.
Authenticity, that most overused and yet stubbornly important word in marketing, becomes slippery here. Audiences are not stupid. Many know when they are being marketed to, and many accept it as part of the social media bargain. But when influence comes from something that cannot genuinely experience the product, the trip, or the emotion it claims to feel, the transaction changes. It risks tipping from persuasion into performance art, admired perhaps, but not trusted.
Ethics trail close behind. Disclosure becomes murkier when the influencer is not a person but a construct. Who is responsible for what is said, implied, or endorsed? If an AI influencer promotes unrealistic beauty standards, who answers for the impact? The developer, the brand, the algorithm, or the smiling digital face itself?
Then there is the subtle creep of sameness. Many AI influencers are trained on similar datasets, informed by similar aesthetic preferences, and optimised for similar engagement metrics. The result can be a sea of polished faces and agreeable opinions, distinct on the surface but eerily uniform beneath. The internet has always had trends. AI risks turning them into templates.
Not Better or Worse, Just Other
It may be more useful to stop asking whether AI influencers are good or bad and instead ask how they are different.
They do not replace human influence so much as reroute it. AI influencers operate more like media properties than individuals. They are closer to mascots, albeit ones that can hold a conversation and remember your name. This places them in a different psychological category for audiences, whether consciously or not.
People do not follow AI influencers in quite the same way they follow humans. The relationship is looser, more observational. There is curiosity rather than connection, interest rather than intimacy. That can be a strength. Not every brand needs to foster parasocial bonds. Sometimes awareness, entertainment, or novelty is enough.
This difference also allows human influencers to lean harder into what machines cannot convincingly replicate. Messiness. Contradiction. Growth. The offhand remark that was not optimised for engagement. The story told badly but honestly. As AI takes on the polished and programmable end of influence, humans may find new value in being conspicuously imperfect.
From a strategic perspective, the presence of AI influencers expands the toolkit rather than replacing it. They work well for launches, evergreen campaigns, and controlled narratives. Humans remain better suited to advocacy, lived experience, and community building. The mistake is treating one as a substitute for the other rather than recognising the distinct roles each can play.
There is also something faintly reassuring about the transparency of artificiality. When an AI influencer is clearly labelled as such, audiences can engage without being misled. The fiction is part of the appeal. Problems arise when the line blurs, when artificial personas are presented as human, and trust is borrowed rather than earned.
Where This Leaves Us
The rise of AI influencers says less about technology and more about us. It reflects a culture comfortable with simulation, accustomed to mediated reality, and increasingly aware that online personas have always been, to some degree, constructed. The difference now is that the construction has become explicit.
For brands, the challenge is restraint. Just because an AI influencer can do everything does not mean it should. The most effective uses tend to be those that acknowledge the artifice and lean into it creatively rather than pretending it is not there.
For audiences, the task is discernment. Understanding who, or what, is speaking to us has always mattered. It matters a little more when the speaker does not breathe.
And for human creators, the rise of AI influence may yet prove oddly clarifying. When machines can replicate polish, consistency, and scale, the human qualities that remain become more valuable, not less. The laugh that breaks the script. The opinion that costs followers. The story that makes sense only because it happened to a real person on a real, inconvenient Tuesday.
So are AI influencers better? In some ways, undeniably. Worse? At times, yes. But mostly, they are just different. Another chapter in the long story of how we tell stories, sell ideas, and decide who gets to be heard. The trick, as ever, is remembering why we cared about influence in the first place.