Meet the AI influencers taking over Coachella festival

Posing in front of Coachella Festival’s iconic Ferris wheel, Aitana Lopez looks like the epitome of California cool. Her long hair is expertly tousled and dyed a soft shade of pink. The Indio sunlight catches on her boho-style belt, and the fringing on her suede outfit seems to dance in the wind. She’s even managed to grab a branded cupholder from Hailey Bieber and Kendall Jenner’s rhode skin x 818 tequila collaboration, an influencer must-have at the first weekend of the festival.

Not that Aitana would have much use for either a lip balm or a glass of tequila, though. Because Aitana, who boasts 392,000 followers, doesn’t really exist. She is an AI-generated influencer — or, as her Instagram bio puts it, a “digital soul” — created by the Barcelona-based tech agency The Clueless, and reportedly earns up to $10,000 each month, thanks to “modelling” work and brand deals. Although her bio makes it clear that she is a virtual creation, it’s less obvious whether the people commenting “stunning!” and “fantastic as always” under her hyper-real photos have cottoned on, or whether they’re buying into the illusion wholesale. Indeed, according to one of her designers, an actor with five million followers once sent her a message asking her on a date IRL.

In a particularly Black Mirror twist, the glowing praise sometimes seems to originate from the accounts of her fellow AI influencers, immaculate “women” with flawless skin, slightly uncanny eyes and euphemistic phrases like “digital storyteller” in their account descriptions. Some opt for the equally malleable term “digital creator”. Their content is often barely distinguishable from the output of your classic Instagram hot girl: there are “get ready with me” videos, workout pictures, iced coffees galore and even Dior-branded under-eye patches. AI “sisters” Mia and Ana Zelu, created by the agency Zelu House, share photos from their “travels” and pose at sports games.

Some are more idiosyncratic, like Granny Spills, an old woman dressed almost exclusively in pink who, according to her social media bio, has been “spilling tea and designer receipts since 1950” and boasts 2 million followers. Her Coachella snaps include photos “with” various Kardashian-Jenner siblings and Hailey and Justin Bieber, posing alongside convincingly AI-generated celebs.

Including famous faces in their “content” is a straightforward way for these virtual influencers to get more eyeballs on their posts (although you do wonder how the stars themselves must feel about having their likenesses dragged into this uncanny valley). So is piggybacking on big cultural moments like Coachella. Influencers have long faked their attendance by renting Airbnbs and hotels nearby and uploading pictures in the desert. Are these AI creations just going one step further?

It’s thought that there are now thousands of virtual influencers operating on Instagram and TikTok. The market size was valued at $6.33bn in 2024 and has been forecasted to reach a staggering $11.78bn by 2033. While you might assume that this uncanny content would be an automatic turn-off for social media users, it’s not that simple.

Research from Sprout Social has found that half of UK consumers would be comfortable with a brand using AI influencers as well as human influencers, while 41 per cent are open to following them. Perhaps in a digital ecosystem already saturated with heavily edited and filtered content, we simply see entirely artificial characters as a logical progression. Perhaps they’re just inured to AI slop.

This burgeoning industry even has an awards ceremony of its own. More than 2,000 “personalities” have already entered the first-ever AI Personality of the Year Awards, which have been described by their organisers as “the Oscars for AI influencers”. Aitana is, of course, one of its official ambassadors. The contenders slogging it out for a total prize fund of $90,000 aren’t just Coachella-going clothes-horses: they cover a whole spectrum. One of them, RoRo Castillos, is a Mexican Reggaeton musician. Another is Alex Laine, an Arsenal aficionado who was designed to appeal to female football fans. She is the result of a collaboration between Aitana’s agency The Clueless and another company, Pixel, though she identifies as “north London through and through”; her posts feature glossy photos “attending” matches at the Emirates stadium, reformer pilates classes and Blank Street coffees. As far as AI influencers go, though, she is still in the lower leagues, with just shy of 1,700 followers.

But why exactly do we need awards for “personalities” that have been generated through AI prompts? Is anyone really convinced by the vaguely preternatural gloss of these digital creations (Alex seems pretty convincing, until you look at the strange angle of her head in her photos from a virtual Columbia Road flower market)? And should we be concerned by this latest blurring of artifice and reality?

The first virtual influencers started to appear about a decade ago. One of the first was Lil Miquela, the creation of an LA startup called Brud. With her blunt fringe, bun hairstyle and freckles, she was designed to imitate a Californian model in her late teens, and was made using CGI rather than AI.