Artificial intelligence—if it’s really as good as its evangelists say it is—poses an existential threat to many industries, such as law, finance, and education. But it seems particularly concerning for creators, who already force themselves to work with and also outwit algorithms to make sure their content lands in front of an audience. 

‍That’s because a new crop of virtual influencers, powered completely by A.I., is breaking out—going viral, building fanbases, and fundamentally changing the way we think about the creator economy. If an A.I. can amass thousands of subscribers on Twitch, what does that mean for the humans trying to do the same? How can we compete with something that can stream 24 hours a day without taking bathroom breaks, getting old, feeling burned out, and, most importantly, never needing to ask their owner for more money?

‍Of course, virtual influencers have been with us for almost two decades now. The first notable example in the U.S. was Lil Miquela, who was launched on Instagram in 2016. As of this year, the self-described "19-year-old Robot living in LA," as it says in her Instagram bio, has a little under 3 million followers on the platform. It's estimated that she pulls in around $10 million a year for the virtual influencer startup that owns her, Brud, which was acquired by an NFT firm called Dapper Labs in 2021.

‍Outside of the U.S., almost a decade earlier, a Japanese media company called Crypton Future Media launched the first version of its cartoon avatar Hatsune Miku, which looked like a futuristic anime character and was powered by a vocal synthesizer created by Yamaha. Fans of Miku could use the vocal synthesizer to make her sing anything they wanted 

‍In recent years, virtual influencers have spread across the globe. At the same time, VTubers—motion capture-powered streamers that typically look like anime characters—have become very popular on platforms like Twitch. VTubers chat with fans, play games on Twitch, and have complex lore and backstories. Many are even owned by the same creator agency—the Japanese company Hololive—and can earn millions of dollars a year.

‍But none of these past attempts have been totally virtual. Miku has ventured beyond our screens and headlined massive concerts via projectors and pre-programmed choreography. Miquela has done "interviews" with the help of a human voice actor and motion capture technology. And VTubers, though they typically keep their real life identity a secret, are still operated by human beings.

‍But things are different now. Thanks to significant progress in artificial intelligence, we are getting increasingly closer to a truly virtual influencer. Most shocking of all, these early experiments with fully-automated creators are attracting actual audiences and are making a lot of money for their respective owners in the process.

‍In December 2022, a VTuber named Neuro-Sama launched on Twitch. It uses a large language model—basically a massive library of text that's used to train the A.I.—to communicate with its followers, and primarily play a musical game called Osu!, often beating some of its best human players. Neuro-Sama has become sophisticated enough to semi-coherently react to other people's videos. In fact, and to make things even more confusing, Neuro-Sama has been making reaction videos to another A.I.-powered Twitch channel, Nothing, Forever, which is an A.I.-generated stream of Seinfeld.

‍Nothing, Forever launched on Twitch shortly after Neuro-Sama did and currently uses OpenAI's GPT-3 language model to approximate scenes from Seinfeld. The A.I. creates a script, voice A.I.s read it, and a video game engine called Unity renders the visuals. The stream, which runs continuously, has quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of fans. It was created by Mismatch Media, which consists of a former Microsoft product manager and a physicist. The duo has said that, aside from being a fun goof, Nothing, Forever is a step toward the future of "broad-scale content creation and generation."

‍To answer the question of whether A.I. could replace the need for human creators or influencers, first we have to answer another, somewhat complicated question: What is an internet creator? It’s only been around five years since we’ve come close to having a concrete answer and have begun thinking of the world of online creators as their own industry. 

‍The people making their living on social platforms might make media, but they aren’t traditional media companies as we’ve understood them. There are very few similarities between a makeup artist on Instagram and a Call Of Duty player on Twitch, for instance, other than content that focuses on a specific interest and their ability to build human audiences on social platforms.

‍A.I. has recently become good enough for something like GPT-3 to reliably produce text about specific hobbies, generate entertaining memes or, in Neuro-Sama's case, play a popular video game. So the inevitable next question is: Can humans form bonds with something that isn't human? Can an A.I. have fans the same way a human streamer does? 

‍Troublingly, the answer seems to be yes, it can. The technology is getting better and audiences more receptive. Both Nothing, Forever and Neuro-Sama have sprawling wikis where fans turn their technobabble into lore and in-jokes, resulting in audience communities that don't look so different from, say, fans of Minecraft YouTubers.

‍Both Neuro-Sama and Nothing, Forever have also run into some issues, though. In January, Neuro-Sama was banned from Twitch for two weeks for Holocaust denial. And just this month, only a few days after Nothing, Forever went viral, it received its own two-week ban from Twitch for transphobia. The A.I. that powers these channels is unpredictable, and even though the digital voices saying these words have no way of understanding what they mean, the humans viewing the content certainly do. A.I. creators might not ever need to eat or sleep, but they can definitely get canceled.

‍It seems naive to say that any of this is going away. But it also feels a step too far to say that projects like Neuro-Sama could truly replace human creators. We're a long way away from robot overlords taking over the world—if it's even possible.

‍Instead, it seems likely that A.I. creators will become yet another automation for creators to compete with; another hoop to jump through to please the opaque systems run by the platforms they make their livings on. Which is maybe the real definition of what it means to be a human online creator: Someone with an infinite capacity to evolve beyond the automations that dictate what they see on the internet.