AI Generated Avatars Becoming Digital Influencers

As the recent rise in Covid-19 threatens once again to shutter advertising agencies, film studios, and similar media "factories" globally, a quiet, desperate shift is taking place in the creation of new media, brought about by increasingly sophisticated AI capabilities. A new spate of actors and models are making their way to people's screens, such as pink-haired Imma, right, who has developed an extensive following in Japan on Instagram and TikTok, and is appearing increasingly on the covers of Japanese magazines. Imma joins a growing host of digital avatars who are replacing human actors, models, and photographers with computer-generated equivalents. Cloud-based GPUs and sophisticated game and modeling software have increasingly attracted the attention of a new generation of artist/programmers who are taking advantage of this to generate images, video, and audio that are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from reality, especially when that reality is otherwise captured via jump cuts, and matte overlays that have made tools such as TikTok and Reels the primary tools for video production for the typical Instagram celebrity. The business potential for such virtual models and spokespeople is huge, according to a recent piece by Bloomberg on digital avatars. Such avatars have obvious benefits over their flesh and blood counterparts.