Only some of these content creators aren’t really there. They don’t even exist at all outside of our screens. They’re generated using AI tools.

Faking Coachella attendance is nothing new — even real influencers have been doing so in recent years — but generative AI has now progressed to the point where it’s become much harder to pick these synthetic creators out amid the flood of real festival attendees. Some make little effort to hide that the “faces” of such social media accounts are entirely synthetic, tagging their bios and posts with disclosures that proudly identify the page’s personas as so-called “digital creators,” a term that obscures whether the person is AI or simply online. Others I can identify just by using my eyeballs, no disclosures needed.

Ammarathegoat is most likely one such AI influencer trying to sell a false reality to its over 170,000 Instagram followers. Images posted by the account, which has no AI disclosure in the bio, show what looks like an AI-generated avatar posing for pictures with members of the Kardashian/Jenner family and real human content creators like Bretman Rock and James Charles, all with recognizable scenes of Coachella structures in the background. There’s no AI information available from Meta or the creator on any of these posts, but the visual distortions on images and videos (both current and older examples) strongly suggest that Ammarathegoat is AI-generated.

Another Instagram account posting Coachella snaps with the Kardashians/Jenners is Grannyspills, an avatar made with Higgsfield AI according to the creator bio, that’s amassed more than 2 million followers. Like Ammarathegoat, video content posted by Grannyspills moves unnaturally, and images carry other signature AI tells, like being too polished or depicting the avatar with inconsistent body shapes. While the account is also labeled as a “digital creator,” none of the images or videos it’s posted include a clear disclosure beyond an “AI info” tag hidden under the three-dot menu on Instagram’s mobile app. On the desktop version, I can’t see any AI labels at all.