Billion-Dollar babies. Fake and real, too?
Virtual influencers are trying to be a thing. For oldies, that's weird. For young 'uns, it's normal?
This is about fake, being fake, and when fake isn’t fake. Or when fake becomes real. Kinda. Mostly?
Advertising techniques have indeed shifted, but they’ve orbited a focal point that’s centered on celebrity, the broadly recognized and generally admired or loved face, or more recently on influencers, who embody, sometimes complexly and ambiguously, a style of life or a stance that observers can identify with. By design, influencers can be more complex, their relationship with “the influenced” more nuanced and rich. Their audiences can even admit some deficiency, perhaps because they’re also willing to admit they are themselves not as polished and pristine as celebrities with their glamour.
The “influencer” phenomenon was itself an innovation leveraging social media, and perhaps the greatest influencer platforms today are Instagram, YouTube, and the ascendent Tiktok. But the actual framework of what we today call “influencers” has been around for some time. Denise Lamberston, who has worked with companies and individuals to explore influencers, noted the transformation of celebrity to influencer: “Celebrity endorsements are an antiquated model left over from traditional advertising that focused on print and television campaigns,” she said in an interview on the “evolution of celebrity endorsements.” In part the transformation is due to the pervasiveness of social media and, well, ubiquitous cameras: “As a celebrity, if you sign on to endorse a beverage, you better drink that beverage and none of its competitors,” she said. “Because access to images of you carrying that drink, consuming that drink and buying that drink is photographed and available immediately on the internet, the consumer will call you out in a split second for not being authentic.”
Authenticity is a high bar. In the celebrity era of long past, either that bar was low, or perhaps people didn’t particularly care about authenticity in advertising — they knew it was contrived. In the 1940s or 1950s, did magazine readers fret over whether Carole Landis or Lucille Ball really said that Schaefer was “the finest beer I’ve ever tasted”? It may have been a simpler age, but I doubt anyone was duped. But it was enough for Schaefer Beer and beer drinkers to have Carole, Lucy, and a raised beer glass (wine glass?) in the same black-and-white photograph. Enough, at least, for magazine readers to think about reaching for the Schaefer carton in the grocery store cooler.
If Nike has bought your influence, you don’t dare wear Adidas or, heaven forbid, Champion.
Celebrities may be widely recognized, but according to Lambertson “[i]nfluencers are experts or personalities with a more narrow reach and a deeper impact. More and more data shows that consumers trust their network for purchasing influence more than celebrities.” It’s a matter of tightly controlled branding, which is influencers domain, according to Lambertson. Influencing also requires a fuller, more sustained involvement with both brands and the potential market, who are after all those who fall under the influence, so to speak.
It’s tempting to think that the influencer phenomenon is something new to the age of online social media. But companies have used personalities to build a “deeper impact” on consumers. Those personalities could also be contrivances — fictional people. Kelly Tires’ “Lotta Miles” and Shell Oil’s “Carol Lane” are examples, both of them media constructs animated by people who performed scripts. “Carol Lane” led discussion groups at women’s gatherings, wrote opinion pieces for newspapers, and was impersonated by different real women across the US at different times. “Lotta Miles” appeared in Kelly Tires ads, but she also played in movies and offered advice. Both of these women, who actually were media creations, had biographies. Both toed a line between reality and fiction, becoming “virtual,” to use modern parlance. (See my earlier post “Rolling Tires,” which also includes links about the two fictional women.)
Lotta and Carol had depth and a kind of reality. Groucho Marx said that Lotta Miles was the most beautiful of women, though it’s not clear whether Groucho knew she didn’t exist in real life. Just like Groucho to do that….
People are unruly, and it was entirely possible for an impersonator of Lotta Miles or Carol Lane to wander from the paths of their well scrubbed and scripted fictions. Sometimes real people are obnoxious, thoughtless, and cruel, as the recent drama about “Ye” (aka Kanye West) shows.
What if the influencer you contracted with was completely tractable, never susceptible to careless impulses like, say, illicit sex, drug abuse, outrage over the kind of omelette that was served, and the like?
Celebrity and influencing have long been products. Technology has made them better.
I’m Leya and I look really real
That is to say, technology has made influencers ideally tractable, devoid of scandal, beautiful, and never aging. They’re on call 24/7/365.
It’s not just a matter of making pretty pictures, either. CNN reported on “The rise of South Korea's virtual influencers” in July 2022. Commenting on the Korean virtual influencer “Lucy,” one of the influencer’s representatives, Lee Bo-hyun, “said they had tried to make Lucy more than just a ‘pretty image’ by crafting an elaborate back story and personality. She studied industrial design, and works in car design. She posts about her job and interests, such as her love for animals and kimbap — rice rolls wrapped in seaweed. In this way, ‘Lucy is striving to have a good influence in society,’ Lee said, adding: ‘She's giving a message to the public to do what you want to do according to your beliefs.’ ”
Another virtual influencer is Leya Love, whose “first appearance” was January 29, 2020, according to the website VirtualHumans.org. Leya’s “backstory” surpasses Lucy’s modest and almost livable virtual life. Leya is an unstoppable overachiever:
She is a co-author of the Amazon bestselling book Life Values: when dreams become true! (WerteVoll Leben) — how cool is that? She has been a speaker on United Nations associated Global Youth Summit hosted by the International Human Rights Commission and is friends with 4m follower Asian actress and human activist Ayesha Omar. Leya cares about kids, she cooks veggi dishes with famous chefs and is friends with other like minded avatars. She believes there is more to life than just the beyond ordinary. She is focusing on bringing a mind — and heart set unto this world to enhance self realization and living a life in alignment with our essence — love. She works with influencers, e.g. meditates or works in projects together, she collaborates with sponsors, partners, brands and artists that have a futuristic and sustainable mindset and thrive to change the world as she does. Leya is now an NFT artist on Rarible and OpenSea, she publishes light shows of her presence and activities in and for nature and humanity, with global artists and large partners in 2021.
We mere humans have no chance to compare, it seems. Virtual influencers are a powerful mix of advanced computer-generated imagery (CGI) and imaginative and not entirely unreal(istic) biography — yes, Leya did “do” a selfie with Remko the Healthy Chef, or at least there’s one on Instagram.
There’s enough there, there, to make people suspend disbelief, or maybe go headlong into more committed faith in the reality of the virtual. As Lee Na-kyoung, a 23-year-old Korean, said about Lucy, “We communicated like friends and I felt comfortable with her — so I don't think of her as an AI but a real friend.” Lee initially “followed” her on social media thinking she was real, and Lucy followed her back.
Manipulation is perhaps at the heart of influencing. Magazine advertisements and celebrity endorsements are cruder versions of the kind. We have already learned how to assess celebrity endorsements of, say, a brand of beer. But with influencers, we’re as yet unskilled in discernment, detection, and interpretation. Virtual influencers surf a vast social media infrastructure built on “following” and digital “friendship.” They have complexity and detail. They are beautiful. They do interesting things.
They seep between the cracks separating a real world and their own.
Dust Bunny, Toaster, IsYourBoi, and the others make a movie
The porosity of real life and virtual “life” goes both ways. Virtual influencers can indeed be created to represent very real life attributes. The hope of Meta and others is that virtual reality may be a way for real humans to represent themselves virtually, too, in a way that makes work life, personal life, and even family life another kind of “real” life.
It’s already happening. There’s even a movie.
The movie is We Met in Virtual Reality. Joe Hunting is the writer, director and producer, and I might add he’s the cinematographer, if such a label applies to a VR world. The film was included in the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, which itself was then a virtual affair due to the Covid pandemic.
“Yes, … it is as crazy as one might think,” said Joe Hunting in an interview aired on NPR’s Here & Now in July 2022. “It is the first documentary filmed entirely inside a social virtual reality app called ‘VR Chat’ which allows users to build their own world, their own settings, their own body — which we call an ‘avatar’ — to go and hang out, go to parties, go to events, go to classes, and engage in socialized dating just like in real life. And I myself shot the documentary in this world with a virtual camera, just like a real documentary.”
I learned of the movie by chance during the week of its premier. For me, the Here & Now interview was one of those “driveway moments” that NPR prides itself on, except I listened when I was searching for diesel for my farm truck.
The movie captures motives and alignments of real life and virtual life. Its avatars came from across the globe, and so the only possible meeting was in a world where space and distance don’t matter. Representation of “who you are” is just as malleable as space, with liberating effect. “One of the biggest appeals with virtual reality worlds is being able to express yourself freely,” Hunting said. “And doing that through avatars is such a joy, and being able to experiment with your body, and be something completely new and escaping your physical body in the real world.” IsYourBoi, one of the “heroes” of the film, said, “I can’t be myself in real life, so I’ll be myself in VR Chat.”
Sometimes real and virtual can intersect. The film includes is a virtual wedding of virtual couples. Two weddings, in fact. One enacted in real life. People behind the avatars came together at Sundance, too, so they could see each others’ “IRL bodies.”
“Making this film brought me so much. The film is about family, community, and finding relationships, finding belonging, through VR, and throughout the documentary — the year-long process — I found all of those things myself,” Hunting said. “The cast of the film is family to me now, and I found a relationship for myself through VR towards the end of making the film. And so, I owe a lot to VR, and I feel extremely grateful that with the success of the film, I’ve been able to meet, and connect, and celebrate things in the real world as well, which has brought me so much joy.”
I’ve been warned that VR Chat is also treacherous and troll-infested, so Hunting’s film provided a more sanguine, even appealing, view. VR worlds for people-with-avatars are the other side of an online world where virtuality and reality intermix. I don’t think anyone really knows where we’ll end up in this hazy new world.
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Tags: celebrity, influencer, virtual reality, CGI, AI, social media, deepfake
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Yes, I know, it’s Greek. But Google Translate does a pretty good job. Nefele — the “first digitally imperfect influencer” — travels around the world and updates her Instagram account, among others things. Karanikolaou, Demi. “Virtual Influencing | Η Nefele προβάλλει ανθρώπινες αξίες στη μόδα με τη ψηφιακή της μορφή (Nefele brings human values to fashion in its digital form).” Harpersbazaar.gr, March 11, 2022. https://www.harpersbazaar.gr/moda/news/22099/virtual-influencing-i-nefele-proballei-anthropines-axies-sti-moda-me-ti-psifiaki-tis-morfi.
Yeung, Jessie, and Gawon Bae. “Forever Young, Beautiful and Scandal-Free: The Rise of South Korea’s Virtual Influencers.” CNN, July 30, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/south-korea-virtual-influencers-beauty-social-media-intl-hnk-dst/index.html.
Hiort, Astrid. “5 Times Virtual Influencers Entered the ‘Real World.’” Virtual Humans, January 25, 2022. https://www.virtualhumans.org/article/5-times-virtual-influencers-entered-the-real-world.
The segment on We Met in Virtual Reality is 10:45-21:45 in the podcast. Here & Now, NPR. “‘We Met in Virtual Reality’ Documentary; Florida Seagrass Is Thriving,” July 27, 2022, sec. Here & Now Anytime. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/27/1114057007/we-met-in-virtual-reality-documentary-florida-seagrass-is-thriving.
A more technical examination of We Met in Virtual Reality in an interview with Joe Hunting: Schindel, Dan. “‘As Organic as a Real Camera’: An Interview with Joe Hunting.” Medium, January 25, 2022. https://immerse.news/as-organic-as-a-real-camera-an-interview-with-joe-hunting-4fd4ea28845b.
And, this week in the seminar’s “daily missives”:
Bratton, Benjamin, and Blaise Agüeray Arcas. “The Model Is The Message.” Noema, July 12, 2022. https://www.noemamag.com/the-model-is-the-message.
Davis, Allison P. “What I Learned on My Date With a Sex Robot.” The Cut, May 13, 2018. https://www.thecut.com/2018/05/sex-robots-realbotix.html.
Halevy, Alon, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 24, no. 2 (April 2009): 8–12. https://doi.org/10.1109/MIS.2009.36.
A couple of students suggested that I share the readings for the “sex robot” discussion last Tuesday. They are quite a mix of perspectives.
Gersen, Jeannie Suk. “Sex Lex Machina: Intimacy and Artificial Intelligence.” Columbia Law Review 119, no. 7 (2018): 1793–1809.
Kleeman, Jenny. Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex, and Death. First Pegasus Books hardcover edition. New York: Pegasus Books, 2020. (We read one chapter.)
Sullins, John P. “Robots, Love, and Sex: The Ethics of Building a Love Machine.” IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 3, no. 4 (2012): 398–409. https://doi.org/10.1109/T-AFFC.2012.31.
Marcussen, Benita. “Men & Dolls.” Benita Marcussen. Accessed April 25, 2022. http://www.benitamarcussen.dk/projects. (We started discussion with photographs from this website, which depicts men and their dolls in various settings, usually in a sympathetic manner that’s sometimes as touching as it is strange.)
Now this is some spooky science. The idea of “filming” within VR is curious, though, especially where there’s a large number of people now interacting so much online. I wonder if others will continue down that path or chalk it up to a one-time oddity?
Also, big bonus points for the Alice Copper reference!
https://youtu.be/sMkT-0i6e9I