Brut America
Brut America
  • 3 days ago
Is the influencer you follow real or AI?

YouTuber Jordi van den Bussche talks to Brut about why he has replaced himself with a virtual influencer, an AI-generated character that lives online ...
Transcript
00:00A virtual influencer cannot die. A virtual influencer can work 24-7, never get tired,
00:06never complain. I think the next person that's going to be the number one influencer is not
00:13going to be a real person. This is Jordi van den Busse, commonly known for his YouTube channel
00:18Kwebbelkop. He posted his first YouTube video in 2011 and quickly rose to fame, becoming a full-time
00:24content creator by 2013. He currently has nearly 15 million followers and has replaced himself
00:30with a virtual influencer. I was grinding, I was making YouTube videos and a bunch of other content
00:35and I experienced a burnout so I had to take some time for myself to really take some better care of
00:41myself and during this process I realized that I'm building a business that revolves all around me
00:49which means that if something would be to happen to me then game over for the business. I came to
00:53the conclusion that virtual influencers was the solution to this. AI and VR technology are
00:59transforming the world of influencers and content creators, giving rise to the virtual influencer,
01:04a computer-generated or animated digital character that lives online. Reportedly, over half of
01:09Americans follow at least one virtual influencer. Mikaela and Luda Magalu are some of the most famous
01:15virtual influencers with very significant followings. A virtual influencer is an influencer
01:23which isn't 100% human. It's either going to be based on a celebrity or a famous person or it's
01:30going to be an entirely newly fabricated entity. Virtual influencers exist in many forms depending
01:37on how the creator behind them likes to run the account. Some creators delegate the entire process
01:42to software, from scripting to editing, even replacing themselves with an avatar in the video.
01:47But a virtual influencer could also be a creator who uses face filters in videos but runs the rest
01:52of their channel manually. You see me, I'm a real person. This is what I look like. But if I would
01:58put on a filter that makes me look like an ape or a marshmallow, I am now a virtual influencer.
02:06So there's this big slider so you can go very much done by human or go completely AI generated.
02:13I personally prefer somewhere in the middle. VondenBusse's new channel, Blue Gaming,
02:18currently has over 680,000 subscribers, generates over 1 million dollars revenue annually,
02:24oh and it's mostly run by AI technology. My goal is to create an AI influencer that's 100%
02:31ran by AI and that makes 100% AI generated content and doesn't need any human intervention.
02:39VondenBusse thinks a major reason behind the virtual influencer hype is their ability to be
02:43scandal-free unlike their human counterparts. To the delight of PR companies and brands looking
02:48for influencer partnerships, virtual influencers cannot be cancelled, for the most part.
02:54There's a lot of challenges that just AI in general is facing but it's yet another hurdle
02:59that everyone in tech is going to try to overcome. What a lot of people have seen though is that a
03:04virtual influencer says something that is offensive and those are simply bugs that
03:10still need to be worked on. The implications of AI are expected to extend far beyond virtual
03:16influencers. It's not just the influencer space that's getting disrupted, it's every industry
03:21in a year from now. The skills that they're teaching in the education system are going to be
03:25outdated, we're going to have to rethink jobs, we're really going to move from a work-first society
03:31to a society that's focused much more on passion. Right now we're at the start of this insane
03:37revolution and I'm super stoked for the future. If I die, please have the AI
03:43continue running my YouTube channel.