No Meals, No Sleep, No Aging: These Influencers Are Made of Code

A few days ago, while scrolling Instagram, I caught myself staring at a pink-haired girl for the longest time.

Workout routines, gaming sessions, an ad for a haircare brand—the comments under her posts were buzzing. Her name is Aitana Lopez, 25, Spanish, and she charges about $1,000 per sponsored post. Brands like Olaplex, Brandy Melville, and Intimissimi have all come knocking.

Then I scrolled a little further—and froze.

This girl doesn't exist.

Not "person not found" in some database—literally nonexistent: she is an AI influencer, and there is no physical body behind her at all. In 2023, the designer Rubén Cruz, with his team The Clueless, "built" her, and she has been called Spain's first AI influencer.

My first reaction: isn't this still just a concept?

No. This has been a running business for years now.

What Is an AI Influencer?

You know the type: they scroll influencers first thing after waking up, watch them over meals, and check what influencers say before buying anything.

So what about AI influencers?

Put simply, you swap the human influencer for code, wholesale. Her face is made with 3D modeling, her personality is written by a persona team, and her daily posts are scheduled by a content team. She doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, doesn't age—and will never have an off day.

By looks, they fall into roughly three types.

Type one is obviously fake at a glance—cartoonish, anime-style, telling you openly: I'm a fictional character. Type two sits in between, animated in texture, but with features and a figure that edge toward a real person's. Type three is the most unsettling: CGI humans that pass completely as real. Without a disclosure label, you would scroll past thinking this is just an ordinary creator.

Guess which type gets brands most excited?

What Are Brands After?

Run the numbers and it becomes obvious.

Top human influencers quote hundreds of thousands, even over a million, for a single ad—and you still have to work around their schedules and worry about PR risk. A virtual influencer like Aitana, with a few hundred thousand followers, charges around $1,000 per ad.

Several orders of magnitude apart.

Not to mention, she has a few things no human can match: no days off, online 24/7; whatever she wears or wherever she appears, you just tweak the parameters—no flying to Milan; run her well, and her persona almost never collapses. Meanwhile Amazon, Google, Meta, and the other big platforms have spent these last few years pushing AI advertising tools, driving the entry barrier lower and lower.

Cheap, controllable, never stops posting. All three hit brands right where it hurts.

And the results? Not just hype, either.

H&M once worked with Meta and brought in the virtual creator Kuki (made by ICONIQ AI) to promote its metaverse-themed collection. The Instagram campaign ran for 10 days across multiple video formats, with Kuki appearing in all kinds of H&M outfits.

The result: ad recall improved 11x.

Eleven times. That's serious.

Her "Life" Is Scheduled

Seeing this, you might be under a misconception: is this just AI one-click generation, money for nothing?

Quite the opposite.

Behind one AI influencer stands an entire crew: 3D modelers, AI engineers, screenwriters, designers, community managers. What she posts today, which comments she replies to tomorrow, which brand she collaborates with—all of it is planned in advance.

A human influencer livestreams their life to you. An AI influencer "performs" a life for you.

The difference isn't on her face. It's behind the scenes.

The top players figured out this playbook long ago.

Lil Miquela, created in 2016 by Trevor McFedries and Sara DeCou, has the persona of a 19-year-old Brazilian-American girl. In just a few years, her Instagram following grew to several million. At Milan Fashion Week in fall/winter 2018, she took over Prada's official account—attending shows, posting behind-the-scenes videos, teasing new pieces. In 2019, she shot a Calvin Klein ad with supermodel Bella Hadid; a top human star and a top virtual one sharing the same frame sparked huge controversy, and Calvin Klein later apologized. In 2021, Prada went ahead and built its own virtual muse, Candy, to front the fragrance of the same name.

From 2016 to now—ten years—and she's still 19.

Different Roads to the Top

Over the past few years, the top players in the virtual influencer world have each walked their own path, and it's fascinating to watch.

The photographer Cameron-James Wilson created Shudu Gram in 2017, the world's first digital supermodel. He said the inspiration came from a South African princess Barbie, and that he started it because he felt the modeling industry badly needed more diversity. Shudu quickly built up 160,000 followers on fashion content; what truly broke her out was that Fenty Beauty lipstick post—Rihanna's brand.

The cartoon-faced Noonoouri walked another road. In 2018, the creative Joerg Zuber (he founded Opium Effect) brought her into the world, and she was later signed by IMG. Yes, the same agency that made Gigi and Bella Hadid stars. She has worn classic archival pieces from Alexander McQueen, Viktor & Rolf, and Thierry Mugler, and in daily life she champions environmental protection and animal welfare. In August 2023, she signed with Warner Music and released her first single, "Dominoes." A virtual person releasing a record—unthinkable just a few years ago.

And then there are those who walked straight out of games. Lightning, one of the protagonists of the Final Fantasy series. In 2015, Louis Vuitton's women's artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière, an avowed lover of games and comics, drew inspiration from her pink hair and face shape for a new collection; the next year, she put on Louis Vuitton and appeared in the spring/summer 2016 campaign.

The one that upended my assumptions the most is Brazil's Lu do Magalu.

Behind her stands the retail giant Magazine Luiza—she was born in 2003, starting out as nothing more than a little voice assistant for online shopping. Over some twenty years, she grew step by step from a customer-service tool into a Brazilian A-lister: Red Bull's first non-athlete ambassador in Brazil, collaborations with Adidas and McDonald's, and the first virtual star on the cover of Vogue Brasil. Along the way, she has also spoken publicly about violence against women, using her influence to push social issues.

An A-lister that evolved out of a "shopping help voice." Go figure.

But Here's Also Where the Problem Sits

If you've read this far, something may already feel off to you.

Right. The problem comes down to one thing: you can't tell anymore.

Remember type three from earlier—the ones that pass as real? When she takes a sponsorship and raves to you about a lipstick in a video, can you be sure there is a living person behind that screen?

The advertising business is built on trust. Once trust collapses, the conversions and repeat purchases that follow are all castles in the air.

So the platforms moved first. TikTok updated its rules back in 2023: realistic synthetic content must be clearly labeled—for example, tagged "synthetic," "fake," "not real," "altered."

I think that's a good thing. Virtual influencers can be a business. They must not become a scam.

Where Is This Business Now?

One widely circulated statistic: 58% of respondents said they follow at least one virtual influencer. Brands report the same gut feeling—virtual content's engagement rate is often higher than that of real humans of comparable size.

What does that mean?

It means this is not the power-fantasy script of "AI snatching real people's jobs." The real story is that marketing's supply side has gained an entirely new "species." One that never logs off—and that brings a brand-new problem: you can no longer easily tell what's real.

From now on, the influencer profession comes in two kinds: those with a body, and those without.

Still remember the pink-haired Aitana from the beginning?

She is a completely fictional person. But the designer Cruz once shared one thing: every week she receives private messages from celebrities—and some even ask her out.

A person who doesn't exist, being taken seriously by the real world.

I don't know how this lands with you. The first time I learned about it, my feeling was: this is far more complicated than "AI is so impressive"—and far more interesting, too.