Countless flowing green wigs risked spontaneous combustion on a 36-degree Melbourne evening as thousands of J-pop fans queued outside John Cain Arena on Friday night. But the heat was irrelevant to the night's headline pop attraction, Hatsune Miku. Miku, as she's known to fans, is a 157cm-tall avatar of a teenage girl with green pigtails. She represents a digital bank of vocal samples created by the ominous-sounding Crypton Future Media using Yamaha's Vocaloid voice synthesiser technology. Users input lyrics and melodies which are "sung" by the bank's sampled voice (Hatsune Miku is voiced by the actor Saki Fujita); some Vocaloid producers "tune" the software to be especially convincing, while others embrace its artificiality.

The next time you buy a flashy new outfit after browsing Instagram, or tap the heart button on a particularly compelling TikTok video, you might discover that the person who posted it isn't real--and you might not care at all. That is, if virtual influencers (and their creators) get their way. A virtual influencer is a digital personality that posts on social media to build an audience of passionate fans, just like a human influencer; at least, that's how it seems. In reality, a team of humans uses computer-generated imagery (CGI), motion capture, and marketing magic to give a digital avatar a voice, a life, and a brand. The result makes virtual influencers seem like, well, real people.

Artificial Intelligence is taking over the music industry. These AI songs are a blend of human and AI technologies like machine learning.