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Paper short abstract

This paper presents findings from ethnographic research on the creation and deployment of AI influencers, investigating how the aspirational labor of the human creators behind these characters is transforming the creator economy on social media and further entrenching gendered tropes.

Paper long abstract

Influencers and the “creator economy” they are enmeshed in have long been at the center of discussions around digital aspirational labor. The recent proliferation of AI-generated content and personas online, however, is rapidly shifting the scale of the creator economy and the experience of social media, which is becoming less oriented around sociality and more around entertainment. Sharing findings from ethnographic interviews and participant observation on Instagram and TikTok, this paper explores the emerging phenomenon of AI influencers. Encompassing AI-generated doubles of human creators, entirely fictional avatars, and various shades of gray in between, AI influencers partially automate the aspirational labor of self-presentation and parasocial connection. As such, they seemingly unsettle the authenticity paradigm, one of the core logics of the Web 2.0 era, which signifies the desire for genuine experiences and emotions outside the purview of consumer culture even while entrenching a view of the self as enterprise (Banet-Weiser 2012). Rather than a complete departure from this earlier logic of social media, the paper shows how AI influencers are perceived as authentic not in the sense of being real but in terms of affective plausibility, vibe, and resonance, a shift that I argue augurs the emergence of "post-authenticity." Taking shape through the auspices of LLMs, social media affordances, and human users, the logic of post-authenticity often amplifies the gendered dimensions of digital aspirational labor, along with the objectification and control of female bodies and sexuality.