Over the past four months, millions of people have taken to controversial life advice from Grandma Spills, an all-pink designer influencer, on TikTok and Instagram. “Flowers die, honey. My Chanel bags are forever,” she says. one video liked this almost a million times.
But Grandma Spills is not a real person. She's a creation of artificial intelligence created by two twenty-something content creators who hope to use her personality to get clicks and close deals with brands. Because AI video tools like Veo 3 Sora 2And Sydance are now creating people who are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, some authors see a business opportunity: creating a new generation of synthetic influencers who may be even more effective at selling things than real people.
These new influencers don't need a paycheck or a wardrobe budget. They can be “removed” anywhere in the world. They will patiently record dozens of takes, dozens of different concepts, and respond directly to thousands of fans.
Some of these synthetic influencers have achieved popularity, in part due to their novelty. But it will take them some time to make a significant impact on the influencer ecosystem. Brand partnerships with AI social accounts are down 30% compared to 2024. Business Insider finds. And recent commercials featuring artificial intelligence characters have faced significant backlash as consumers wince at their creepiness, lack of authenticity and the threat they pose by taking human jobs.
However, these types of AI personas are becoming more and more common, and the marketers who create them believe that a hybrid future is imminent, in which the faces populating social media feeds are just as likely to be synthetic as they are real.
“What’s really great about AI content is that they don’t shy away from saying things that a normal person wouldn’t feel comfortable saying in public,” says Eric Sueres, co-creator of Granny Spills. “This grandma says some pretty crazy things. She's relentless and I think people are just blown away by the wow factor.”
The rise of AI
There have been several major influencers in the AI space for a couple of years now. Lil Miquela launched in 2016 and has 2 million followers on Instagram; Father Lopez has more than 380,000. But until this year, the technology wasn't quite ready for small or mid-tier content creators to produce their own realistic characters at cost.
But artificial intelligence video generation models such as Google's Veo and OpenAI's Sora are rapidly improving. This spring, when Veo 3 was released, Sueres, a content creator who does street interviews for TikTok, saw the technology as a direct threat to his livelihood. “Because eventually, maybe brands will be able to just type out one or two sentences and get the perfect video that we spend a lot of time creating in real life,” he said.
Instead of fighting these deepfakes, Suerez decided to lead the competition and create his own AI influencers. He and Adam Waserstein, his business partner at Blur Studios, now have a range of artificially intelligent characters, including a Bigfoot character, a street interviewer and a fitness instructor. Their most successful project is Granny Spills, which has amassed 400,000 followers on TikTok and 1 million followers on Instagram in its first few weeks.
The couple can create dozens of granny videos a month, using artificial intelligence throughout the workflow. They train Claude from Anthropic on their past videos and ask him to create new concepts and scenarios. They then refine Claude's ideas and insert them into their extensive tooltips templates in Veo and other AI apps. “It can take 5 to 10 minutes to make one video, as opposed to shooting a whole video and editing and all that,” Vaserstein says.
While the videos have gone incredibly viral and viewers have enjoyed Granny's chutzpah, monetization is more of a challenge. Sueres says their videos are flagged as “unoriginal” by TikTok and removed from the creator rewards program. (A TikTok spokesperson, when asked to comment, pointed to site page which states that videos may violate community guidelines due to “unoriginal or low-quality content” or “fraudulent behavior.”)
Instead, Suerez hopes to make money from Facebook, YouTube and Cameo, as well as deals with brands that Granny can promote, such as luxury clothing or hotels. The goal, Sueres said, is to “integrate brands' products and services into the kind of entertaining interviews or challenge-based content that we do on the streets without it feeling like advertising.”
Large-scale creation
Granny Spils is just one character in a rapidly growing universe of synthetic influencers. Polina Zueva, a marketing strategist based in New York, creates some of these AI influencers for her client brands. She says AI influencers are “profitable from the start because you don't need anything” and allow brands to conduct thorough A/B testing of which characters and concepts people respond to best without having to actually shoot a bunch of different variations.
Zueva adds that because AI can easily translate languages, she was able to launch the campaign simultaneously in Malaysia, Singapore and Nigeria. However, she said the US market is harder to crack. “Americans are more wary of these technologies,” she says. “They will think twice before spending money on a recommendation from an influential AI.”
In late October, AI imaging platform OpenArt hosted an event for AI influencers in New York City dedicated to Granny Spills and the AI singer. Ksenia Monet among others. Chloe Fang, head of partnerships at OpenArt, says users will be able to engage more directly and actively with their favorite AI influencers. “The way you interact with these influencers could be much more personalized, more personal, and happen much more frequently and much faster,” Fung says.
Real influencers can also transfer some of their engagement to their AI avatars. Jake Paul, for example, has already provided users with Sora permission create videos in his likeness, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did.
AI reaction
However, virtual influencers are still a rarity in the influencer industry as a whole. Linqia, an influencer marketing agency, surveyed more than 200 corporate marketers and found that 89% of them have no plans to work with influencers, AI avatars or digital clones in 2026.
“This is one of the emerging themes that people are intrigued by, but there's still very, very little adoption,” says Kate Bendes, chief strategy officer at Linqia. “As a non-human, you obviously have not consumed the product or tried the service. Thus, there is an inherent inauthenticity to endorsing a brand.”
And since many people don’t trust or like AI, there is still a reputational risk for brands running AI campaigns. A Guess the advertisement in Vogue with an artificial intelligence model caused a furious reaction, as did the appearance of artificial intelligence actress Tilly Norwood. Users are becoming increasingly frustrated with the amount of AI-related garbage on social media, with some choosing to log off altogether.
Read more: When everything is fake, what's the point of social media?
However, the creators of Granny Spills believe they are at the forefront of a powerful new medium. “The possibilities are endless because you can create things that are almost impossible to do in real life,” says Waserstein. “Your imagination can run wild, it can run free.”
