If I don't have tacos at least once a week, I glitch. Last year, The Cut’s Emilia Petrarca wrote about Brud’s statement that it hoped to be the modern Will & Grace, saying “As with all things Brud, it’s hard to tell if they’re trolling us with this reference or if they’ve been sipping too much of the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid.” The team has argued here and there that Lil Miquela’s support of Black Lives Matter, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ causes can inspire real change. The piece walks through other exaggerations: co-founder Sara DeCou’s one-time claim to be President Obama’s “special adviser on the ethics of AI development, and the other co-founder Terver McFedries’s claim to have written a bill of rights for AIs.” But “Brud holds no patents in AI, robotics, or related fields,” and Lil Miquela is little more than a well-crafted image. Brud calls itself “a technology startup specializing in artificial intelligence and robotics,” she points out, and news outlets from Architectural Digest to CNN are simply parroting this verbatim. Jenna Sauers, writing for Cultured in April, paid special attention to the strange myth-building Brud has done around its creations and its founders, some of which has included outright lies. Lil Miquela, the effortlessly hip forever-19-year-old, has 1.5 million followers. Lil Miquela, the effortlessly hip forever-19-year-old with 1.5 million followers, also has two friends: Blawko, a boy and self-described “young robot sex symbol” whose mouth is constantly covered with designer pollution masks and who has a paltry 135,000 followers and Bermuda, his ex-girlfriend and Lil Miquela’s blonde, Trump-voting foil, whose bio boasts that she is a “Robot/Unbothered mogul with daddy’s PIN and a flawless highlight.” All three were created by the team at the mysterious Los Angeles startup Brud for vague reasons. There aren’t really that many virtual influencers - yet.įirst, the cast of characters. Like the blockchain! Or you know, it could take all of the hot people’s jobs.
#3D WORLD MAGAZINE APRIL 2016 MOVIE#
The virtual influencer could be a novelty technology, destined to flash in the pan like “hoverboards” or movie theaters equipped to spray people with “rain” in the middle of Batman movies. (And if this isn’t going to happen, why are people lining up to throw millions of dollars at it? We forget they are gambling.) The way funding is heaped onto every startup that gets 15 minutes of attention from the press typically makes the success of bizarro-world innovations feel inevitable and unavoidable - the most barbed response we can summon the energy for is to drag out that same tired Jurassic Park meme about the hubris of making shit for no reason. The future of commerce.Īre these lithe, high-resolution bodies really coming for the jobs held by models and scene kids for the last several decades?īut are these lithe, high-resolution bodies really coming for the jobs held by models and scene kids for the last several decades? There is little evidence so far that this is the case, beyond a handful of successful Instagram accounts and a lot of conversation. Suddenly, virtual influencers were the future of ads. In January, TechCrunch reported that Lil Miquela’s creators had closed a $125 million investment round led by Spark Capital. After months of speculation in Instagram comments and on news sites - with theories ranging from “Sims marketing stunt” to “horrifying social experiment” - the secret was revealed and was shockingly mundane: Yeah, it’s advertising.
Of course, no arguably useless technological innovation actually comes from nowhere, and she was no exception. The most famous example of the virtual influencer is Lil Miquela, who debuted on Instagram in April 2016, as if from nowhere. Also - she’s not real! She was made by a computer to look as much like a hot and charming human being as possible without scaring people. She is mysterious, yet her personality is fantastic. Every story about a virtual influencer starts the same way: She is beautiful.