computer generated people
Questionable illusory world: Virtual influencers conquer Instagram and Co.
The computer-generated influencer imma is followed by more than 400,000 people on Instagram
© Aww Inc/dpa
They look almost like real people, talk about their feelings and are politically active – although they only exist on screen. The illusory world of virtual influencers is fascinating to many people, but it also raises questions.
She worked all night. In a tracksuit, the fashion influencer with a striking pink bob cut is sitting at a wooden table, looking deep into the laptop, pen in hand, open magazines and a sheet of paper in front of her. “I sketched cute stuff. Don’t tell anyone that I didn’t take a shower,” the Japanese woman called “imma” comments on the photo on her Instagram channel. But what the photo doesn’t reveal is that imma isn’t really a human being.
Not a real person – but human feelings
The fact that imma is only a virtual appearance is hardly recognizable to the naked eye in many of her pictures. But when you see her in motion in her short videos, you can clearly see that she was created on the computer screen. According to the company Aww Inc., which developed imma, she is Japan’s first virtual model. In other countries, especially in Asia, a number of virtual influencers have emerged in recent years. Like their real role models, they adorn the covers of fashion magazines, act as advertising media and some even play concerts in front of thousands of spectators.
To ensure that the optical illusion is always perfect, she regularly shares photos on social media that show her with real people. For example with the Spanish cartoonist Joan Cornella at his exhibition opening in Tokyo or with the DJ Steve Aoki and the reggaeton star Maluma. But imma not only shows her followers her jet set life between fashion metropolises and world celebrities, but also her feelings. “Ever since I was born, I’ve always hated being lonely,” she comments on a sad-eyed photo of herself wearing an oversized hoodie and holding a black umbrella. “What do you do when you’re lonely?” In another post, she tells of a fight with her brother.
Lack of transparency as a form of exploitation
With this kind of emotional appeal, the creators of imma go well beyond the virtual. They build a personal bond with the viewer by consciously portraying their character as vulnerable. That seems to be well received, because even if imma can be clearly identified as an artificial figure, more than 400,000 users follow her on Instagram. When asked about the obvious artificiality of imma’s emotional world, their creators say that real influencers are often accused of staging a fake life on the Internet. Ultimately, people’s lives take place so much in the digital space that the boundary to reality is constantly blurring, the company continues. “Everything we see online and in the media is a narrative and it’s everyone’s own choice to believe it or not.”
The media expert Oliver Zöllner from the Stuttgart Institute for Digital Ethics sees the big problem with this form of emotional addressing by artificially created beings in the lack of transparency of the programs used. Not everyone can immediately see that virtual influencers are not real people, says Zöllner when asked by the dpa. And he adds: “Not everyone is aware of the underlying business models of data acquisition and exploitation.” Zöllner speaks of a form of exploitation that goes deep into the core of human beings.
The virtual influencers are usually controlled by human teams in the background, according to the website virtualhumans.org, which claims to be operated by industry insiders. imma, for example, is brought to life in a studio, with actors and others using motion capture. With some influencers, however, artificial intelligence is actually involved, such as Kuki Ai, who can talk to her fans on her website using a chat robot. On social media, on the other hand, according to virtualhumans.org, Kuki must still be controlled by real people.
Virtual influencers are cheaper and more predictable
But virtual influencers can not only express feelings, but also attitudes. Lil Miquela, for example, who is considered to be one of the virtual influencers with the widest reach, is not only successful as a musician and advertising face of large fashion companies, but also as an activist. In her Instagram profile she shows the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter”. In a post, the 19-year-old shows her around 2.8 million followers with kayal-colored tears running down her face, along with the sentence: “For the normalization of ugly crying in public.” It is unclear how authentic this affects their fans. In any case, Time magazine chose the influencer with the bangs and the prominent gap in her teeth as one of the 25 most influential people on the Internet in 2018 – alongside such names as Donald Trump and Rihanna.
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It is also clear that imma, Lil Miquela and Co. have an unbeatable advantage for companies over their flesh-and-blood competitors: they have no unpredictable human whims and are cheaper. “But as a person you quickly saw through them if you dealt with them a bit. And they probably get boring quickly,” adds Oliver Zöllner.
According to Zöllner, looking to the future, there are indications that tech companies are increasingly inviting people into virtual spaces “in which we are supposed to interact with each other and with virtual characters in a variety of ways.” It is up to the people themselves to use such technical possibilities to create something that is useful for society.