I don’t follow tennis, but I’ve seen plenty of discussion about Wimbledon this year. However, I couldn’t tell you any of the scores, or even the players’ names.
The Wimbledon ‘news’ that I’ve been hearing is all about Mia Zelu, an influencer who posted photos on Instagram from her time at the event. The catch? She wasn’t really there. In fact, she’s never really anywhere.
What is an AI influencer?
If you weren’t already aware (because I wasn’t!), Mia Zelu is a ‘digital creator’ with over 160,000 followers on Instagram, sharing fashion inspiration and her ‘daily moments and memories’. I’ve quoted these terms as I don’t think they’re truly fitting for who Mia is and what she documents on the platform, because Mia Zelu is AI-generated.
Her ‘creator’, or perhaps team of people that generate the images, run, and manage her account, is unknown; she is the entire face and personality of the profile, just as a real influencer would be. She even has a ‘sister’, Ana Zelu, whose Instagram profile has over 260,000 followers.
The Zelu sisters certainly aren’t the first AI influencers in the digital world.
Lil Miquela began posting on social media in 2016, amassing 2.4 million followers on her Instagram profile. She’s completely AI-generated and describes herself as a robot, but that didn’t stop her from making TIME Magazine’s ’25 Most Influential People on the Internet’.
Her Instagram profile looks similar to any other influencer’s, but her captions often reference the fact that she isn’t human, such as a photo that shows her laughing at a cafe with some friends, captioned “wasn’t programmed with a family, so I had to build one”. Lil Miquela has