The 15 minutes of fame promised to everyone half a century ago turned out to be not a harmless game with the vanity of millions of people, as many believed before the era of social networks, but serious business. The opportunity to grab part of the media space, albeit for a short time, almost immediately began to be used by manipulators - thousands of YouTubers, Instagram and tickers, as well as owners of channels in "Telegram" successfully work on behalf of business and politicians, attracting subscribers with a stream of unobtrusive photos, texts and videos. In some countries, coup attempts and mass acts of disobedience have been carried out under their leadership. But social media stars have proven vulnerable - they can be silenced, shut down or otherwise neutralized. However, they now have virtual competitors generated by artificial intelligence (AI), devoid of these human flaws, writes the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
As the experience of dozens of successful show business projects in West and Southeast Asia shows, the only difference between live and virtual bloggers is that the latter can have an endless impact on their target audience and cannot be silenced.
Since 2016, one after another, social networks have been "exploding" well-produced bright projects. Chinese Luo Tiani and American Lil Michela have gathered billions of audiences, performed in huge concert halls accompanied by orchestras and music groups, and expensive tickets for these shows sold out in a few days. In 2018, Lil Michela was named one of the 25 most influential people in Times magazine. In March 2019, Luo Tiani was accompanied by one of the best pianists in the world, Lang Lang. And these are just two examples. Virtual idols publish dozens of joint "selfies" with Hollywood stars, interviews with them are published by leading publications, and their biography is full of "romances" with real "heroes" from secular chronicles.
The animation blogger industry, due to the high cost of using artificial intelligence systems, is still monopolized by big players. But sooner or later, these technologies will become available to millions, and painted idols will blur the line between reality and the virtual world.
The creators of new virtual stars are sure to find ways to manipulate their chosen target audience much more effectively than current media and film corporations, especially given the ability of artificial intelligence to anticipate audience needs and conduct independently, albeit not always accurate sociological research.
Today, creating a virtual hero close to the heart of any close social or national group is much cheaper and faster than training a very talented actor. He doesn't even have to get paid. The audience is not interested in the fact that the character is actually a fiction. The digital hero will become a speaker of the opinions and aspirations of their collective self.
When artificial intelligence learns to create a borderline reality, it will affect an adult in the same way that cartoons affect a child's psyche. Virtual influencers will potentially become a more powerful force than all the thousands of real bloggers who collect tens of billions of likes every day from fans around the world.
The attractiveness of the drawn characters will be enhanced by the confidence of each subscriber that the message from his favorite artist, table tennis coach or psychologist has been sent to him personally. And if necessary, you can always talk about the time with the chatbot. The feeling of personal presence in the subscriber's life is one of the main advantages of the virtual blogger. And the fact that it will be impossible to distinguish it from the present is demonstrated by the recent presentation of "Meta", during which most of the time on screen was not the founder of "Facebook" Mark Zuckerberg, but his avatar. Meta showed how captivating and realistic video can be created by a robot.
Today, artificial intelligence has learned not only to copy and reproduce the real world, creating the illusion of real life in virtual accounts. AI independently complements and creates a new reality that is indistinguishable from our daily lives. At the same time, the number of companies expanding the capabilities of robots is growing rapidly.
The development of artificial intelligence depends not so much on the algorithms of its work - they are in the public domain, but on the information that its creators teach them. Robots have learned to circumvent restrictions and rewrite ads to send spam. Some take pictures of oral descriptions, and in newsrooms, neural networks replace journalists. Given all these processes, one must at least be prepared for the emergence of virtual influencers on the Russian media market.
Millions of people today have dialogues and discussions with bots on social networks, confident that they are communicating with real people. Spam calls are generated by artificial intelligence based on the characteristics of speech, psychological state and data collected on the Internet about the life priorities of a potential client. It makes sense that the next step is to create video content that is indistinguishable from real life. In 1938, a CBS radio report on a Martian attack on the United States caused panic across the country and many kilometers of congestion with refugees on the Canadian-Mexican border. Only those who had enough knowledge and did not succumb to mass psychosis laughed at the "miracle". Whether we have enough discretion and peace of mind not to be manipulated in the future is a big question.
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