Over time, I’ve noticed that the fake people on my timeline have started looking more and more like everyone else on it. Characters like Emily Pellegrini and Aitana Lopez moved a bit closer to reality — or at least to the reality of that well-traveled, well-off friend from college you didn’t keep in touch with, forever posting from nice restaurants and beautiful places, or from Coachella and Wimbledon. Not exactly relatable, but, then again, most professional influencers aren’t either.

Even then, many of these accounts aren’t standard ones by any means. Lopez is the product of a Spanish creative agency called The Clueless, which manages a stable of AI influencers. Pellegrini’s creator, who goes by the pseudonym Professor EP, told me he used to manage OnlyFans creators. Now he sells courses teaching people how to make AI influencers of their own.

The novelty has worn off. Early AI influencers stood out because there were so few of them. Now they are part of a much larger mess of AI-generated content inundating social media: low-quality drivel lazily copied from chatbots, slop images and videos, and that catchy Lord of the Rings disco song that took over my TikTok for a month.

The fake people are now everywhere. They’re upselling drop-ship junk, scamming men out of money with fake photos, pushing disinformation and racist talking points, and catering to an increasingly weird, often sexual niche. Of course, there are a lot of thirst traps. There’s also a lot of mundane content, with avatars simply copying whatever’s popular among human creators, often just putting their fake faces on it.