Both influencers are successful

In some ways, Gigi is just like other young social media influencers.

With perfect hair and makeup, she logged in and chatted with fans. She shared snippets: eating, skin care, and applying lipstick. She even has an adorable baby who appears in some videos.

But after a few seconds, something might look a little off.

She can munch on a pizza made of lava or wear snowflakes and marshmallows as lip gloss. Her hands would sometimes go through what she was holding.

That’s because Gigi isn’t real. She is the artificial intelligence creation of Simone Mckenzie, a student at the University of Illinois who needed to make some money over the summer.

Ms McKenzie, 21, is part of a fast-growing group of digital creators who create a series of videos by typing simple prompts into artificial intelligence chatbots such as Google Veo 3. Experts say the genre, dubbed “AI slop” by some critics and reluctant viewers, is taking over social media.

Its creators also achieved great success.

“One video made me $1,600 (£1,185) in just four days,” Ms McKenzie said. “I was like, OK, let me just keep doing this.”

Two months later, Gigi had racked up millions of views, and Ms. McKenzie had earned thousands of dollars through TikTok’s Creator Fund, a program that pays creators based on the views they receive. But experts say she’s not the only one using artificial intelligence to easily spread the virus.

“It’s spiking right now and it’s probably going to continue,” said Jessa Lingel, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on digital culture.

Its predecessor — which can now generate videos of almost anything in just minutes — had the potential to upend the lucrative influencer economy.

While some say artificial intelligence is destroying social media, others see its potential to democratize online fame, Lingle said. Those who don’t have the money or time to buy fancy backgrounds, camera settings, or video editing tools can now become famous.

Social media influence has only recently become a legitimate career path. But in just a few years, the industry’s value has grown to more than $250 billion, according to investment firm Goldman Sachs. Online creators often draw on their own lives—their vacations, their pets, their makeup habits—to create content and attract followers.

AI creators can build the same thing – just faster, cheaper and without the constraints of reality.

“It definitely has the potential to disrupt the creator space,” said Brooke Duffy, a digital and social media scholar at Cornell University.

Ms. McKenzie, Gigi’s creator, said it only takes her a few minutes to create a video and she sometimes posts three videos a day.

For influencers like 26-year-old Kaaviya Sambasivam, who has about 1.3 million followers across multiple platforms, that’s not feasible.

Depending on the type of video she’s making – whether it’s a recipe, a day in the life vlog, or a makeup tutorial – it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to fully produce. She had to shop, plan, set up the background and lighting, shoot and then edit.

AI creators can skip almost all of these steps.

“It raises the question: Is this going to be something that we can compete against? Because I’m one person. My output is limited,” said Ms. Sambasiswam, who is from North Carolina. “There would be months when I would be down and I would just post the bare minimum. I couldn’t compete with the bots.”

She started building her channel while living with her parents during the coronavirus pandemic. She said she taped her phone to the wall to film without any set-up. Eventually, she used the money she earned as an influencer to buy tripods, lights, makeup and food for her videos. It took her years to build a following.

Ms McKenzie said she considered becoming a more traditional influencer but didn’t have the funds, time or setup. That’s why she created Gigi.

“I have a lot of books and stuff on my desk at home,” she said. “It’s not the most visually appealing. It definitely makes it easier to use artificial intelligence to choose any background you want.”

When Ms. McKenzie got started, she turned to Google’s Veo 3 chatbot and asked it to generate a woman—a human in her place.

Gigi is 21 years old and has tanned skin, green eyes, freckles, winged eyeliner and long black hair. She then asked the chatbot to let Gigi speak. Now, Gigi is taking to every video to berate commentators who accuse her of being an artificial intelligence. Then, to prove them right, she eats a dizzying cookie made of avocado or slime.

Ms Duffy said digital transformation was not new. First, there are programs like Photoshop for image editing. Next, apps like FaceTune make it easier for users to change their faces on social media. But she said the main precursors to today’s hyper-realistic AI videos were the celebrity deepfakes that emerged in the late 2010s.

But Ms Duffy said they now looked more real and could spread more quickly.

AI videos range from the ridiculous (a cartoon of working cats at McDonald’s) to the surreal, like footage from a fake doorbell camera. They represent a variety of genres—horror, comedy, cooking. But none of this is true.

“In a way, it has become a meme culture,” Ms. Duffy said.

A 31-year-old American woman living in South Korea has a TikTok page dedicated to Gamja, an AI-generated puppy who wears headphones, cooks meals and curls her hair. She received millions of views and formed partnerships with companies who wanted to be featured in her videos.

“I wanted to incorporate things people love, including food and puppies, in a way that had never been done before,” she said.

27-year-old Daniel Riley is one of the largest artificial intelligence content creators on TikTok. He had millions of viewers, but they had never seen his face. Instead, his “time travel” videos have earned him nearly 600,000 subscribers and tens of millions of views.

“POV: You Wake Up on the Day Pompeii Erupts” and “POV: You Wake Up as Queen Cleopatra” are among his most popular works, taking viewers on a 30-second fictional day in ancient history.

“I realized I could tell stories that would normally take millions of dollars to produce and connect people to a different era through their cell phones,” he said.

He also developed another revenue stream — a bootcamp that teaches others how to create similar AI videos for a monthly fee.

“Stop calling me AI,” Gigi says at the beginning of every TikTok. She’s arguing with the skeptics – but some viewers have no doubt she’s real.

On the one hand, AI videos are nearly indistinguishable from reality, which is a real problem, especially for children who are not yet media literate, Ms. Ringel said.

“I think it would be almost impossible for the average person to tell the difference very quickly,” she said. “You’re going to see an increase in misinformation, you’re going to see an increase in scams, you’re going to see an increase in … lame content.”

Experts say, on the other hand, AI videos can provide cartoony, exaggerated material that is mesmerizing.

Ms Duffy said: “It’s these images and posts that seem to draw the line between reality and duplicity that grab our attention and encourage us to share.”

A Harvard study found that among AI users between the ages of 14 and 22, many said they use it to generate content such as images and music.

The question, though, she said, is whether human insights can keep up with rapidly advancing technology.

Gamja’s creator says she gets letters almost every day from people online worried about her AI-generated puppy: They think he’s eating unhealthy food because they think they’re watching a real dog.