Virtual influencers: the AI-made creators behind the profiles

A virtual influencer isn’t a person hiding behind a filter — it’s a digital character in its own right, with a name, a biography, a recognizable look and a social profile its creators update on a regular schedule. There’s no one snapping selfies behind the account; instead, an agency or studio writes the character’s story, shapes its appearance and posts content the way any working creator would. That’s a different goal from apps that let anyone generate a personal portrait with generative AI: there, the user stays themselves behind a new filter, while here a fictional character is born and goes on to live its own life on social media.

The pioneers: before the generative-AI boom

The trend is older than it looks. Lil Miquela has had an active Instagram account since April 23, 2016, created by the agency Brud (founded by Trevor McFedries and Sara DeCou, later acquired by Dapper Labs in late 2021). Shudu Gram, whose bio calls her “the world’s first digital supermodel,” first appeared on April 22, 2017: she was built by Cameron-James Wilson, founder of the agency The Diigitals, who has said he made her “from a very cheap gaming PC in a shed in my mom’s garden.” Both profiles predate the mass adoption of generative-AI tools by ordinary users by several years.

Why an agency builds a character instead of hiring a person

The clearest case is Aitana López, the Spanish virtual model built by the agency The Clueless. Co-founder Rubén Cruz explained the choice in plain business terms: “We did it so that we could make a better living and not be dependent on other people who have egos.” The agency has said it found human models and influencers too unreliable and difficult to work with.

Real-world example: according to a 2023 Fortune article, Aitana generates an average of €3,000 a month for the agency, with a peak of €10,000 in a particularly good month; most of that revenue comes from social media ads and ambassador deals for supplement brands.

Not every case reaches numbers like that, but when it works, a virtual profile can bring in revenue comparable to a campaign built around a human influencer, with fewer variables to manage: no delays, no ill-timed comment, no contract to renegotiate over a change of agent.

How a character like this gets built

A virtual influencer comes together from three pieces that have to stay consistent over time. The first is the biography: age, hometown, personality and even a tone of voice, written before the first image ever goes up — Miquela’s bio, for example, describes her as a “change-seeking robot with the drip.” The second is the look: a digital model of the face and body, built with graphics and image-generation techniques that also draw on the neural networks behind advanced generative-AI systems. The third is the content pipeline: photos, videos, confessional-style clips and sometimes music, published with the steadiness of a genuine profile rather than as a handful of one-off images.

Looking closely at what sets these characters apart from a simple graphic product also helps make sense of the wider debate around artificial intelligence: here, AI isn’t just generating a single image, it’s sustaining a character that keeps “existing” day after day.

Advertising rules don’t disappear

A recurring question is whether advertising law even applies to a character with no physical body. In the United States, the answer arrived in 2023: the Federal Trade Commission revised its Endorsement Guides, “changing the definition of ‘endorsements’ to clarify the extent to which it includes fake reviews, virtual influencers, and tags in social media,” as its June 29, 2023 announcement put it. That’s a specific US rule, not a universal principle, but it draws a clear line: being digital doesn’t put a profile outside the reach of advertising transparency. Anyone scrolling past sponsored content, human or virtual, can use the same skill that helps with spotting fake news: learning to recognize a post that was built on purpose.

A growing market, with caution

So how big is all this, taken together? Market research firm SNS Insider puts the global virtual influencer market at $8 billion in 2025, projects $11.2 billion already by 2026, and forecasts 40% average annual growth through 2035, when it expects the market to reach $231.4 billion. Those numbers deserve to be treated for what they are: a research firm’s commercial projections, not official statistics, and ten-year forecasts on a brand-new market carry wide margins of uncertainty. Still, they point to the direction agencies and brands are heading in a field that, in 2016, didn’t even have a shared name.