The Streamer Who Can't Fall From Grace

Lately I've been idly scrolling through livestreams, and the other day I stopped on a beauty livestream.

The streamer was good-looking, with impossibly smooth skin, explaining the products with perfect clarity and going strong all night without a break. My friend leaned in for a look and froze: "Wait... is that a real person?"

"She's not," I said.

He froze even harder. "Not a real person? No brand would actually use a bunch of fake people on stage, right?"

Wrong. Completely wrong.

Over the past few years, virtual influencers — manufactured by AI to stand in for brands — have been multiplying faster than you could ever imagine. Market research firms have put out the numbers: in 2024, the global virtual influencer market was worth just $6.2 billion; by 2034, that pie is forecast to balloon to $171.5 billion. Ten years, a 27-fold jump.

So what exactly is a virtual influencer?

It's when a brand uses artificial intelligence and computer graphics to build a digital figure with a name, a face, and even a backstory and personality, then makes it the spokesperson, the content creator, the "A-list influencer." It doesn't need sleep. It never ages. And it doesn't carry a single character flaw.

Think about it — isn't that the "perfect spokesperson" every brand dreams of?

It has a fairly evocative nickname in the market: the "top influencer off the factory line." Because it's built on an assembly line: want a gentle, refined persona? Build a gentle, refined one. Want a cool, edgy one? Build cool and edgy. Need a new theme for an event tomorrow, or a new product line the day after? It can be "reset" at any time.

Real people are uncontrollable; digital people are controllable. That's the entire reason they exist.

So how do the numbers break down? Let me pull it apart for you — it's interesting.

By type, in 2024 "AI-generated avatars" held a 45.3% share. They're cheap, customizable, and easy to mass-produce, which is why they caught on. By industry, fashion and beauty are the biggest buyers at 38.2%, because that field prizes "looks" above all, and a virtual figure can showcase a product from a full 360 degrees while sparing you all those costs of a real photo studio. By platform, social media took 62% — the world of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube is born to perform.

North America, meanwhile, leads the whole market, holding two-fifths of it alone in 2024, with the United States contributing $2.37 billion on its own.

You might ask: are these digital people actually any good?

Good enough to make real streamers a little anxious.

Here's an example. Dove, the personal-care giant under Unilever, ran an ad built on AI-generated content that racked up 3.5 billion impressions and brought in a 52% share of new customers. TikTok has gone even further, putting tools straight into brands' hands — its Symphony ad tool lets brands mass-produce virtual streamers to sell on their own, no contracts to sign, no spots to book, and speaking several languages.

Costs cut. Results up. Risk gone.

But everything has its flip side.

The fatal weakness of these "fakes" is precisely that word — "fake."

Audiences aren't stupid. However glossy a virtual influencer looks, the moment they're recognized as a product of algorithms, trust takes a hit. Ask a virtual human to endorse skincare, and real women will inevitably wonder: "It doesn't even use this stuff itself, so why should I believe it'll keep me moisturized?" That kind of doubt can't be rushed; it can only be fed slowly and steadily with long-term, sincere content. That's precisely the lesson virtual influencers find hardest to learn.

So their opportunity isn't in "replacing real people."

It's in the places they're genuinely good at: fashion, gaming, entertainment, even education. All scenarios that "don't need a real reputation behind them" — just visual impact and being online around the clock.

The real barrier, in fact, is money and technology.

Building a lifelike digital human that can speak naturally, make expressions, and interact across every platform costs no small sum in R&D, and it has to be constantly fed content and iterated on. Small brands looking to enter face a shortage of both technology and budget. The fast movers in this space — Brud, Soul Machines, DeepBrain AI — are all tech players built on heavy investment.

Back to the livestream I opened with.

Whether my friend finally placed an order, I don't know. But when he leaned in and asked me "Is that a real person?", it suddenly hit me: this industry is no longer a concept out of the news. It has already crawled into the screens we scroll every day and become part of our everyday reality.

So what does "trend" really mean?

A trend is when people start getting used to something that "looks unreal" — and that's when its market quietly grows.

Digital people can't collapse. But whether they win your heart still depends on whether they learn to "be human."