Over the past four months, millions of people have enjoyed the uproarious life advice dispensed by Granny Spills, an influencer wearing all-pink designer suits, on TikTok and Instagram. “Flowers die, honey. My Chanel bags are forever,” she says in one video that was liked nearly a million times.
But Granny Spills is not a real person. She is an AI creation, generated by two twenty-something content creators who hope to use her persona to get clicks and nab brand deals. Because AI video tools like Veo 3, Sora 2, and Seedance now create people that are virtually indistinguishable from real ones, some creators see a business opportunity: to forge a new generation of synthetic influencers that might be even more effective at selling things than real people.
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These new influencers don’t require salaries or wardrobe budgets. They can be “filmed” in locations anywhere around the world. They will patiently record dozens of takes, of dozens of different concepts, and respond directly to thousands of fans.
Some of these synthetic influencers have achieved virality, partially from their sheer novelty. But it will take a while for them to make a significant impact in the influencer ecosystem. Brand partnerships with AI social accounts are down 30% compared to 2024, Business Insider finds. And recent ads with AI characters have faced severe backlash, as consumers flinch at their eeriness, their lack of authenticity, and the threat they pose in taking human jobs.
Still, these types of AI characters are growing more and more commonplace—and the marketers who create them believe that a hybrid future is imminent, in which the faces that populate social media feeds will just as likely be synthetic as they are flesh-and-blood.
“What’s really great with AI content is that they’re not embarrassed to say things that a normal human would typically feel uncomfortable putting out in the public,” says Eric Suerez, one of the creators of Granny Spills. “This granny character says some pretty crazy stuff. She’s ruthless, and I think people are just amazed at the wow factor.”
Rise of AI influencers
There have been a few major AI influencers for a couple years now. Lil Miquela was launched in 2016 and has 2 million followers on Instagram; Aitana Lopez has over 380,000. But before this year, the technology wasn’t quite ready for small or midlevel content creators to launch their own realistic characters at cost.
But AI video generation models, like Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora, have been rapidly improving. This spring, when Veo 3 was released, Suerez—a content creator who does street interviews for TikTok—saw the technology as a direct threat to his livelihood. “Because eventually, maybe brands would just be able to type one to two sentences and get a perfect video that we spend a lot of time producing in real life,” he said.
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Instead of trying to fight back against these deepfakes, Suerez decided to front-run the competition and create his own AI influencers. He and Adam Vaserstein, his business partner at Blur Studios, now have a series of AI characters, including a Bigfoot character, a street interviewer, and a fitness instructor. Their most successful project is Granny Spills, who garnered 400,000 followers on TikTok and 1 million followers on Instagram in her first few weeks of existence.
The pair can crank out dozens of Granny videos a month by using AI throughout their workflow. They train Anthropic’s Claude on their past videos and ask it to create new concepts and scripts. They then fine-tune Claude’s ideas and insert them into their extensive prompt templates in Veo and other AI apps. “Making one video can be 5-10 minutes, as opposed to going out and filming an entire video production, editing, and all that,” Vaserstein says.
While the videos have gone incredibly viral, with viewers delighting in Granny’s brazenness, monetization is a greater challenge. Suerez says that their videos are getting flagged by TikTok as “unoriginal,” and are de-monetized from the Creator Rewards Program. (A representative for TikTok, when asked for comment, pointed to a website page that states that videos may violate community guidelines due to “unoriginal or low-quality content” or “deceptive behavior.”)
Suerez instead hopes to earn money from Facebook, YouTube, and Cameo, and to ink deals with brands that Granny can promote, like luxury clothing or hotels. The goal, says Suerez, is to “combine products and services of brands into those entertaining interviews or challenge-based content that we do in the streets, so it doesn’t come across as an ad.”
Creating at scale
Granny Spills is just one character in a rapidly growing universe of synthetic influencers. Polina Zueva, a New York-based marketing strategist, creates some of these AI influencers for her client brands. She says that AI influencers are “profitable from the beginning because you need nothing,” and allow brands to do robust A/B testing on what characters and concepts people respond best to without having to actually shoot a bunch of different variations.
Zueva adds that because AI can translate languages easily, she was able to launch a campaign simultaneously in Malaysia, Singapore, and Nigeria. However, she says the U.S. market has been harder to crack. “Americans are more cautious about these technologies,” she says. “They will think twice before they spend money based on the recommendation of an AI influencer.”
In late October, the AI image generation platform OpenArt hosted an event for AI influencers in New York, celebrating Granny Spills and the AI singer Xania Monet among others. Chloe Fang, head of partnerships at OpenArt, says users will be able to engage with their favorite AI influencers in a more direct, heightened way. “The way of interacting with these influencers could be way more personalized, way more customized, and at a much more frequent and instant pace,” Fang says.
Actual influencers could also farm out some of their engagement to their AI avatars. Jake Paul, for instance, has already given users of Sora permission to create videos in his likeness, as has OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
AI Backlash
However, virtual influencers are still a rarity in the influencer industry overall. Linqia, an influencer marketing agency, polled over 200 enterprise marketers and found that 89% of them were not planning to work with influencers, AI avatars, or digital clones in 2026.
“It’s one of these newer topics that people are intrigued by, but still have very, very little adoption,” says Keith Bendes, Linqia’s chief strategy officer. “As a non-human, you obviously have not consumed the product or tried the service. So there is an inherent inauthenticity to the support of a brand.”
And because many people distrust and dislike AI, there is still a reputational risk for brands putting out AI campaigns. A Guess ad in Vogue with an AI model drew fierce backlash, as did the introduction of an AI actress, Tilly Norwood. Users are growing increasingly disenchanted with the amount of AI slop on social media, with some choosing to log off altogether.
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Still, the creators of Granny Spills are confident that they’re on the forefront of a powerful new medium. “It’s endless opportunity, because you can create things that are nearly impossible to do in real life,” says Vaserstein. “Your imagination can go wild, can go free.”