I ran into a Discord where the sole topic was running hot girl “AI influencers” on Instagram. Literally hundreds of thousands of people thirsted over them, and the operaters made real money.
Their systems were pretty sophisticated. The whole process is automated; LLMs write the posts and do sexy DMs, imagegen and videogen models and such do the sexy images and videos, controlnet keeps the look consistent-enough between media. LLM agents press all the buttons. I think there may have even been OnlyFans stuff.
So a single operator could run dozens of bots.
…It’s not hard for these models, either. DMs and short Insta posts are stupidly simple language, and media of sexy people in clothes, doing insta-style poses, probably makes up most of the image/video model training corpus.
I think there was some engagement farming with other bots, of course, but it would snowball and turn organic. Real Instagram users were thirsting over these bots.
…It got me thinking.
Is it really that different from a parasocial relationship with a “real” influencer?
I mean, functionally, its exactly the same. The users can’t even tell the difference.
I posit that the whole “thirst” influencer system was broken and exploitive to everyone involved, except Facebook.
It was fucked up to begin with.
AI just made it more obvious to onlookers. It destroyed the pretense that any of it was “real.”