We’ve recently commented on the AI influencer phenomenon, which seems to be taking social media by storm. With advanced AI imaging, more AI influencers are popping up, and they already look comparable to the likes of Kim Kardashian. The social media influencing world depends on primarily women selling their bodies for revenue. Instagram has tended heavily in this direction, and with the advent of OnlyFans, the temptation to flaunt oneself so provocatively is tangible for many.

National Review writer Haley Strack thinks that the AI influencer horde will out-compete real-life influencers and eventually rule out the need for humans at all. She writes,

Some criticize AI for giving young men another possibly perverse, sexual outlet online — but men who fall into virtual thirst-traps already have real pornographic material to view. If incels want a bridge between reality and fantasy, as shown by TikTok’s weird NPC trend, they should view AI, not real people. Humans weren’t designed to sell themselves on the internet. 

AI influencing isn’t a good thing; it just gives us more reason to disavow social media’s image-driven tendencies. If AI replaces hypersexualized influencers, humans themselves could be less artificial. Would that be so terrible?

-Haley Strack, Let AI Influencers Win | National Review

Strack notes a silver lining in all this virtual influencing mayhem – it might just make us realize how dehumanizing this kind of online behavior really is, and how it invites a depersonalized vision of the world.

Philosopher J.P. Moreland is concerned that AI avatars will only further distance men from proactively seeking connections with real women. “Men won’t get married,” he said in an interview with YouTuber Sean McDowell. AI will make the romantic endeavor even more virtualized than it already is. The benefit may well be as Strack notes that AI influencers will spare real women the dishonor of being objectified. AI exposes what has been social media’s problem all along: it peddles people’s intrinsic value according to a digital image, not truth.