The influencer is dead. Long live the influencer.
An AI-generated man in a suit racked up 36 million views with a video of him shadowboxing. Then a cryptocurrency appeared in his name, soared in value and then lost 99% of its value in a day. Welcome to the new influencer economy.
If you're wondering, the guy's name is Jean Philanthrope. He has a blond bowl cut, a curled moustache, he doesn't say much and just appears in strange places shadowboxing to music.
But by hell does it work. Ten TikTok videos with over 57 million views. It's a remarkable audience for a person who...
...well, doesn't exist.
Then came the coin (it feels almost inevitable doesn't it). A Solana cryptocoin token called $JEANPHIL appeared shortly after, showing the token price briefly reached $0.02845 before falling by more than 99% in a day. It's market value had hit the tens of millions of dollars - the sort of turnover you'd expect of a fairly decent sized company. This doesn't prove the people who made Jean Phil sold tokens at the top but... it smells.
Yet, I remind, this is a ridiculous-looking man in a suit shadowboxing.
What has happened to the world?
The more I think about things like this, the more I actually struggle to be able to fault it (well, excluding the coin pump & dump if true...). Billions of people all over the world take their phone out of their pocket and doomscroll Instagram/TikTok because they want to be entertained. They want something to pick them up in, honestly, a pretty dreary world at times. And if Jean Phil can do that, then job done. Maybe it doesn't really matter that he doesn't exist?
The problem is that AI is really good at generating 'extremes'. Jean Phil is extreme in every way - you just don't really get actual humans with ridiculous features like that (I mean, happy to be corrected...) - but AI can create them just fine. And people like extremes - it's eye-catching, it's funny, it makes you laugh.
And the proof is in the pudding with billions of collective views across now thousands of AI-generated influencers.
So is the influencer dead? Absolutely not. It's more that the production line is changing.
The person on screen might be the least human part
There are a few ways people can create AI influencers. Sometimes the whole thing is fabricated - you can design who you want and use an AI tool to generate video scenes & voices.
Other times, a real person actually does the performance. They record themselves walking, dancing, whatever it might be - and the AI system then maps that timing and movement onto a different-looking character. These 0ne's are often the most convincing as the scene can be real, and someone is genuinely acting within it with genuine public reactions - it's just replaced with a different person in post.
It's not that this type of curation doesn't take work - of course it does and AI video generation is token-hungry. But a lot of people feel strongly that 'influencers' need to be human. The whole thing is inherently human because the influencer generally represents a human someone else wants to aspire to be, or to be like, or to like & engage with. If it's just an AI then... at best it's misleading, and at worst it leads to completely unattainable desires and wishes - and the sometimes extremely negative impact that can have on people (think unattainable physiques...unattainable wealth...).
So are human influencers dead?
Well, hopefully not dead in the actual sense. It hasn't reached the AI apocalypse yet (see my countdown timer).
It's a tough question. My honest & frank view is it is getting harder & harder to tell what is real out there. AI slop used to be hilariously bad. Now I would venture to say that 20% of videos & shorts you watch you don't even realise are AI. They still made you laugh. Even with the rise of AI watermarks (I wrote about this as well...), I get the (sad) feeling we are entering a world where we just simply won't be able to tell what's real. Influencers, shorts, photos, videos, songs you name it. Albeit I think AI songs have a LONG way to go - they are absolutely terrible.
Will human influencers be able to compete with AI-generated characters? I think they'll struggle - it's like trying to compete with someone who can instantaneously teleport to any location in the world, do anything at any time with anyone, and generate content at absurd rates working day & night.
The only firm upper ground humans will have is their literal physical presence.
As funny as Jean Phil is, you won't see him turning up to fan meet & greets.