For the past four months, millions of people have been enjoying the uproarious life advice on TikTok and Instagram from Granny Spills, an influencer who wears an all-pink designer suit. “Flowers die, honey. My Chanel bag is forever,” she said in one video, which has been liked nearly a million times.
But Grandma Spils isn’t a real person. She is an AI creation generated by two 20-something content creators who want to leverage her persona to get clicks and brand deals. Now that AI video tools like Veo 3, Sora 2, and Seedance can create people who are virtually indistinguishable from real people, some creators are seeing a business opportunity in cultivating a new generation of synthetic influencers who are more effective at selling products than real people.
These new influencers don’t need a salary or wardrobe budget. You can “shoot” anywhere in the world. They patiently record dozens of takes, dozens of different concepts, and respond directly to thousands of fans.
Some of these synthetic influencers have achieved virality through their sheer novelty. However, it will take some time for them to have a significant impact on the influencer ecosystem. According to Business Insider, brand partnerships with AI social accounts are down 30% compared to 2024. And recent ads using AI characters have faced intense backlash, with consumers balking at their creepiness, lack of authenticity and threat to take away human jobs.
Still, these kinds of AI characters are becoming increasingly common, and the marketers who create them believe that a hybrid future is imminent, with the faces you see in your social media feeds as likely to be synthetic as they are flesh-and-blood faces.
“What’s really great about AI content is that they’re not shy about saying things that normal humans would feel uncomfortable saying publicly,” says Eric Suerez, one of the creators of Granny Spills. “This grandma character says some pretty crazy things. She’s ruthless and I think people are just surprised by the surprise element.”
The rise of AI influencers
There have been several major influencers in AI over the past few years. Lil Miquela was founded in 2016 and has 2 million followers on Instagram. Aitana Lopez has over 380,000. But before this year, the technology wasn’t ready for small businesses and mid-level content creators to launch their own realistic characters at any cost.
However, AI video generation models such as Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora are rapidly improving. When Veo 3 was released this spring, Suerez, a content creator who conducts street interviews on TikTok, recognized the technology as a direct threat to his livelihood. “Because eventually brands may be able to type a sentence or two and get the perfect video that we spend so much time creating in real life,” he said.
Read more: Google’s new AI tool produces convincing deepfakes of riots, conflict, and election fraud
Instead of fighting back against these deepfakes, Suerez decided to get ahead of the competition and create his own AI influencer. He and Blur Studio business partner Adam Waserstein are currently creating a series of AI characters, including a Bigfoot character, a street interviewer, and a fitness instructor. Their most successful project was Granny Spills, which gained 400,000 followers on TikTok and 1 million followers on Instagram in its first few weeks.
By using AI throughout their workflow, the duo is able to create dozens of granny videos per month. They train Anthropic’s Claude on past videos and ask him to create new concepts and scripts. Then fine-tune Claude’s ideas and insert them into a wide range of prompt templates in Veo and other AI apps. “It can take five to 10 minutes to create one video, as opposed to having to do all the video production, editing, etc.,” says Vaserstein.
The video has gone incredibly viral, with viewers delighted by the grandma’s brazenness, but monetizing it is an even bigger challenge. Suerez said their videos were flagged by TikTok as “not original” and were no longer monetized through the creator rewards program. (Requested for comment, a TikTok representative pointed to a page on its website that said the video may violate community guidelines due to “non-original or low-quality content” or “deceptive conduct.”)
Instead, Suerez hopes to make money from Facebook, YouTube and Cameo and sign deals with brands that Grandma can promote, such as luxury clothing and hotels. The goal, Suerez said, is to “incorporate a brand’s products and services into interesting, on-the-street interviews and challenge-based content so it doesn’t come off as an advertisement.”
large scale creation
Granny Spils is just one character in the rapidly growing world of synthetic influencers. New York-based marketing strategist Polina Zueva has created several of these AI influencers for her client’s brands. She says AI influencers are “profitable from the get-go because they don’t require anything,” and allow brands to do robust A/B testing on which characters and concepts people respond to best without actually shooting a ton of different variations.
Zueva added that because AI can easily translate languages, they were able to launch campaigns in Malaysia, Singapore and Nigeria at the same time. But breaking into the U.S. market is more difficult, she says. “Americans are becoming more cautious about these technologies,” she says. “They will think twice before spending money based on AI influencer recommendations.”
In late October, AI image generation platform OpenArt hosted an event for AI influencers in New York, celebrating the likes of Granny Spils and AI singer Zania Monet. Chloe Fang, head of partnerships at OpenArt, said users will be able to engage with their favorite AI influencers in a more direct and sophisticated way. “The way you interact with these influencers is likely to become more personalized, more customized, more frequent and at an immediate pace,” Fang says.
Real influencers can also leverage some of the engagement with AI avatars. For example, Jake Paul has already given Sora users permission to create videos that look like him, as has OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
AI backlash
However, virtual influencers are still rare in the influencer industry as a whole. Influencer marketing agency Linqia surveyed over 200 business marketers and found that 89% do not plan to work with influencers, AI avatars, or digital clones in 2026.
“This is one of those new topics that people are excited about, but haven’t seen adoption yet,” says Keith Bendes, chief strategy officer at Linqia. “As a non-human, you obviously have never consumed a product or tried a service, so there is an inherent inauthenticity in brand support.”
And with many people distrusting and hating AI, there is still reputational risk for brands running AI campaigns. Vogue magazine’s Guess ad featuring an AI model drew intense backlash, as did the appearance of AI actress Tilly Norwood. Users are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the AI deluge on social media, with some choosing to log off completely.
Read more: What’s the point of social media if everything is fake?
Still, the creators of Granny Spills are confident they are at the forefront of a powerful new medium. “The opportunities are endless because you can create things that are almost impossible in real life,” Beiserstein says. “Your imagination can run free.”
