Last week a technology investor posed a question: “Your Favorite Creator Isn’t Real—Does it Matter?”
Olivia Moore, who works at the venture fund Andreessen Horowitz, pitched this question to the internet after she virtually joined the viral “Bama Rush” TikTok trend — the now-annual internet tradition during which would-be sorority sisters at the University of Alabama immortalize their rush experiences for the public (and introduce non-Southerners to “Enewton” bracelets).
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Because Moore isn’t a college student, she couldn’t actually rush. So she created a fake influencer called “Janie B” using a range of different AI video generation platforms, and sent her to rush instead. Janie wore cute outfits, became entangled in interpersonal drama and danced alongside other Greek-life hopefuls, much like a regular Bama rushee.
So, whether it matters if a creator is AI, might be up to the beholder. Audiences might find entertainment in digital characters, and businesses might benefit from faster and easier marketing. But, one “retired influencer” and internet analyst told Straight Arrow the digitization of an industry built (at least partly) on women’s creativity might serve to make that creativity less valuable in the long term.
READ MORE: Social media isn’t so social anymore. What will platforms do next to grab our attention?
An experiment in AI detection
“What she lacked in reality, Janie made up for in entertainment,” Moore said. Users engaged with her in the comments, supported her journey and discussed and shared Janie’s videos on Reddit.
After much speculation about the account’s origins, Moore also posted a video of herself, explaining that Janie had been an experiment to determine how people would respond to AI, and to see how good TikTok’s AI detection algorithms were.
It makes sense she might want to know.
Last October, the venture capital fund Moore works for incubated and invested in a startup called Doublespeed, which creates packages of AI-generated influencers for brands. The company’s launch video suggests it was at least inspired by bot-network techniques used in international misinformation campaigns.
The company manages thousands of AI influencer accounts from physical banks of real phones, in order to evade the bot-detection systems of most social media platforms — something employees call “instrumented human action”. According to a post on X by Doublespeed founder Zuhair Lakhani, the bots also send real commenters AI-generated messages like “Sorry to hear you’re experiencing x, you should try y” to sell things.
While Janie was fun for audiences, Moore explained in her blog, “entertainment” is unlikely to be a big enough reason for people to truly support AI creators.
“We value creative work partly for the thing itself and partly for what we believe is behind it: someone’s thought, effort, taste and care,” she wrote. She concluded that platforms should encourage people to disclose when they’re using AI, so audiences can better appreciate how “a person had an idea, made choices and used AI to bring it to life.”
Does AI content affect human creators?
Apart from the audience or platform reaction, the influx of AI creators will likely also impact human creators — especially young women, according to Sukhnidh Kaur, a retired influencer and technology analyst who has worked at Apple and Microsoft. Her recent book “Your Perfect Dream Girl: Influencers, AI, and the Future of Desire” explores her changing relationship to the fifteen-year online career she started in her early teens.
Women are specifically important to social media platforms, Kaur told Straight Arrow, because they help sell things — often to other women, who are instrumental in domestic spending decisions. Women create content that people want to watch, and keep people engaged on the platform. One 2025 influencer marketing report found that 72% of influencers were female, rising to 85% among micro-influencers, defined as those with between a thousand and 10,000 followers. This includes the Bama Rush girls, she said, who were creating content but also advertising, gaining sponsorships and creating content for public consumption.
If women’s presence on the internet is a valuable commodity, she said, then in a way, fake influencers “are just making the distribution pipeline of that same commodity more efficient.”
AI influencers don’t have the problems that real women influencers do: “She doesn’t get tired, she never looks bad cause you don’t prompt her to look bad,” Kaur said, and “she doesn’t have to blowdry her hair in the morning.”
This could make it cheaper to market products, she said, and could also start to replace influencers’ access to money they make from that work, because it’s quicker and more efficient for the market.
“I would love to see research on who is actually making AI women, because my intuition is that it’s largely going to be businessmen,” Kaur said. This does appear to be true for some creators.
In a Wired interview, the creator of one viral account described his thought process: “Why not make an AI-generated girl using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro and sell bikini photos of her online?”
But Kaur believes that young women in the real world might not relate to AI influencers in the ways companies hope.
She draws a strong distinction between influencers who sell products, like makeup or home goods, that affect appearances, versus influencers who speak to women’s inner, creative or cultural worlds. Kaur never personally marketed products, but she says that many of her followers still feel very connected to the personal and creative work she shared online.
While AI influencers might streamline the process of sharing and selling products, Kaur said creators “that actually move and shake culture” aren’t doing that.
“You know, those are your artists. Those are your comedians. Those are your indie, fashion, unique” creators, she said. Because AI image generators are trained on past data, it’s much harder to create something that is truly groundbreaking or new.
So, Janie might be really fun to watch, but she would not be able to exist without the input of thousands of real-life girls who participated in the Bama Rush video trend over the last five years. She makes sense in the context of the thousands of news articles, thinkpieces, reaction videos, comments and jewelry trends spawned by years of content made by aspiring pledges. The videos have been widespread for long enough that the trend was declared dead this year. Anne Helen Peterson, who has extensively covered the phenomenon in her newsletter, posted that “Bama RushTok is Over” because the former secrets of sorority acceptance are now too widely known, and participating in the trend might now hurt rather than help young women’s chances.
And while the rise of AI content might seem inevitable, Kaur said the nuances of the connections that audiences have with real influencers still matter.
“As someone who grew up as an influencer, I understand that young girls are not just looking to spend money,” Kaur said. “Women have thoughts and opinions and ideas about how the world should work, and dating, and science and philosophy and everything.” She thinks it will take a little longer for AI to be able to respond to the needs of women’s inner worlds — if it ever can.
Round out your reading
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- Why Gen Z finally wants Boomer hand-me-downs.
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- Smart glasses helped a man see the world. The privacy panic took it away.
- Americans are keeping cars longer, so the auto industry is making it easier to pay for repairs.
