Here comes the AI sponcon
Social media is filled with an endless supply of people selling things, from Shein try-on hauls to health supplement and gadget product placements. Influencer marketing disrupted traditional advertising, creating an army of living room salespeople pumping out content meant to entice strangers at scale — and tech companies’ vision for the future includes more automation.
TikTok announced today it was adding new capabilities to Symphony, the company’s AI ads platform it launched in 2024. The features go beyond generating basic videos and images — instead, the system’s new output mimics what audiences are used to seeing from human influencers. The company says advertisers will be able to upload images, provide a text prompt, and generate videos with virtual avatars holding products, trying on and modeling clothing, and displaying a brand’s app on a phone screen. Some features already available to TikTok users — like creating a video out of a photo — will also now be available to advertisers.
AI creep in the influencer industry has been a steady development: advertisers already have the option of using synthetic characters (sometimes resembling real people) to do things like read scripts to promote brands and products. This new set of features brings an interactivity, with virtual avatars essentially acting like human influencers by using and modeling products. or advertisers, the appeal is a mix of automating processes and cutting costs — an AI avatar can’t demand specific rates or terms in a contract, and a brand can generate an endless amount of content without recording each video separately. AI tools are also being used to target specific audience members, generate ideas for content, and dub audio into different languages. Some advertisers are moving slowly with AI-generated content or are even outright resistant to it. But the expansion of AI ads tools on TikTok signals that the platform, at least, is taking it seriously: why share TikTok Shop affiliate earnings with a thousand random creators when you could instead farm it out to a few virtual faces and bodies?
For human influencers, the potential threat of AI is two-fold: synthetic content could be used in place of human work, and the influx of AI-generated videos could drive rates down for everyone. But so far, AI tools in the influencer space are largely behind the scenes: content creators say they are using AI tools to edit and plan content or find brand deals, even as tech companies continue to push AI-generated profiles and characters. AI-generated sponsored videos — especially of something like trying on clothes or using an app — significantly expand the bounds of influencer content. Is it really a product recommendation if the entity trying to sell you on it doesn’t exist? And if all brands need to promote something is a body, what does it mean for the human influencers that the cheapest, fastest path with the least resistance is being pushed by the platforms they rely on for their income?
TikTok says all content generated using the ads tool will have a label indicating it as AI-generated, and that it will go through “multiple rounds of safety review.”