I was once asked what I tell clients about navigating AI in influencer marketing.
What should brands do about AI-generated creator content? Should they work with virtual influencers? Should they be worried about synthetic faces, cloned voices, and increasingly convincing digital humans?
My answer was simple:
“I don’t.”
Not because I do not have a view. I have several. But because I do not believe the creator economy needs another group of people deciding what audiences are allowed to enjoy.
At its core, the creator economy is built on communities.
A creator makes something. People choose to follow them, engage with them, share their work and return week after week. Over time, that attention becomes a community. That community might be built around beauty tutorials, football commentary, financial advice, chaotic family content or, apparently, a talking baby hosting a podcast.
If people knowingly enjoy the content, who are we to tell them that their connection is invalid because the output is not technically human?
The audience has already voted. They clicked follow.
You cannot champion innovation and still beg technology to slow down
I am not an AI purist.
I cannot call myself a champion for innovation and technology while quietly hoping we can return to the good old days, when every image was photographed, every caption was typed from scratch and no one had to ask whether the person in the campaign had pores.
Technology has always changed creative work.
Photoshop changed photography. Auto-Tune changed music. Filters changed beauty content. Recommendation algorithms changed what becomes popular. Smartphones turned ordinary people into publishers, producers, and media channels.
AI is another significant shift, but it did not arrive in an industry untouched by technology.
The creator economy itself exists because technology disrupted traditional media. It feels slightly ironic to celebrate that disruption, then suddenly becomes deeply committed to tradition when the next wave arrives.
That does not mean we should adopt every tool blindly. Innovation without interrogation is just hype with a software subscription.
But resisting AI simply because it challenges our current definition of creativity is not a strategy either.
The AI creator conversation is not one conversation
Part of the problem is that we often speak about “AI in influencer marketing” as though it is one thing.
It is not.
There are several levels of AI involvement, and they raise very different questions.
At one end, you have AI-assisted creators. These are human creators using AI to brainstorm ideas, write outlines, translate content, edit footage, generate backgrounds, analyse audience responses, or create more variations of an asset.
The person is still the creative lead. AI is part of the production process.
Honestly, this will soon be so normal that asking whether a creator used AI may feel like asking whether they used editing software.
Then you have AI-native formats. These are trending creative executions that could not easily exist without generative technology. Talking babies, historical figures doing “day in my life” videos, animated objects, impossible transformations or exaggerated versions of familiar internet formats.
The creator may still be human, but the final output is deliberately synthetic.
Then there are AI-generated characters and virtual influencers. Their appearance, voice, personality, and content may be partially or fully generated. They may have fictional backstories, recurring behaviours and carefully designed visual worlds.
At the furthest end, we may see autonomous creator systems that generate content, respond to comments and adapt their personalities based on audience data.
That is where things become both fascinating and slightly Black Mirror.
These categories should not be treated as though they carry the same opportunities, risks or responsibilities.
Using AI to remove background noise from a creator’s video is not the same as inventing a digital person and presenting them as a real woman with a real skincare routine.
Context matters.
The line for me is transparency
My position is not that anything goes.
The key is transparency.
AI-generated content should either be so blatantly AI that no discernment is required, like a talking watermelon interviewing celebrities on a podcast, or it should be clearly disclosed.
People should know what they are engaging with, particularly when the content is commercial.
If a virtual influencer is selling a beauty product, the audience should know that the skin, body and results being shown are synthetic. If a creator’s voice has been cloned or their likeness has been digitally altered, that should be understood and agreed upon. If a testimonial is fictional, it should not be dressed up as lived experience.
The issue is not simply whether AI was used. The issue is whether AI was used to mislead.
There is a difference between creating fantasy and manufacturing falsehood.
Audiences are perfectly capable of enjoying fiction. We watch animated movies, follow fictional characters and become emotionally invested in people who do not exist. The ethical problem begins when a brand benefits from the audience believing something is real when it is not.
Transparency protects the audience, but it also protects the creator and the brand.
It allows people to decide whether they are comfortable with what they are buying into.
And once they know, the decision belongs to them.
Does authentic automatically mean human?
There is another provocation I keep returning to.
Does authenticity mean human?
Or does authenticity mean coming from a point of truth, irrespective of the medium?
We often speak about authenticity as though it is a production technique. Natural lighting. No script. Front-facing camera. Slightly messy bedroom. Creator says, “You guys have been asking me about this.”
But none of those things guarantee honesty.
A human creator can produce content that is calculated, misleading or completely disconnected from their real beliefs. An AI-assisted piece of work can still communicate a deeply human truth.
Perhaps authenticity is not determined by how the content was made.
Perhaps it is determined by whether the story, intention and message are truthful.
A creator could use AI to visualise a memory, express an emotion or build a world that would have been impossible within their production budget. The final image may be synthetic, but the perspective behind it may be entirely real.
In that sense, AI-assisted and even AI-generated work can still be authentic.
Because authenticity lives in the story you are telling, not only in the mechanics of the creative output.
I am still thinking through this, and perhaps that is the point. AI is forcing us to question definitions we have used too casually for years.
Community is still the strongest signal
Whether a creator is human, virtual or somewhere in between, they still need to earn attention.
Technology can generate a face. It can generate a voice. It can generate 100 pieces of content before lunch.
What it cannot automatically generate is cultural relevance.
It cannot guarantee taste. It cannot guarantee trust. It cannot guarantee that people will care.
A synthetic creator with no point of view is still boring. A human creator with no connection to their audience is also still boring.
The creator economy has never simply rewarded content production. It rewards resonance.
The real measure is whether a creator understands their community, contributes something valuable and gives people a reason to return.
That is why I am less interested in policing whether a creator is “real” and more interested in understanding whether the relationship with the audience is real.
Are people engaging willingly?
Is the creator adding value?
Is the commercial relationship transparent?
Does the work respect the community it is speaking to?
Those questions matter more to me than whether every pixel was produced by a person.
The future will probably be hybrid
The most interesting future is unlikely to be humans versus machines.
It will be creators who know how to combine human judgement, lived experience, cultural intelligence, and community understanding with the scale and creative possibilities of AI.
Creators will build digital doubles that help them work across languages and markets. They will use generative tools to prototype ideas, personalise content, and create new entertainment formats. Some will develop fictional characters alongside their personal brands. Others will reject synthetic content completely and make their humanity the product.
All of those models can coexist.
Brands should not begin by asking, “Should we use AI influencers?”
They should ask what role technology is playing, what value it creates for the audience, and whether everyone involved understands what is real, what is generated, and what is being sold.
The creator economy has always evolved according to what communities choose to watch, love, and share.
AI does not change that.
It simply gives them more things to choose from.
