AI Is Changing The Influencer Space. Here’s How To Prepare.

With the release of AI tools such ChatGPT, Dall-E, Lensa and others, creators and consumers across industries have been racing to understand how their work will be affected and how they can get ahead of the changes.

But for influencers and content creators specifically the question is perhaps more dire. Because if AI tools become advanced enough to create viral online posts, at scale, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional influencer work, the industry cannot remain the same.

And according to Ryan Detert, CEO of AI-based influencer marketing company Influential, the existence of tools that advanced is not a matter of “if” but “when.”

“There’s no future where this doesn’t happen in some fashion,” said Detert about AI tools which can generate online content. “The question will come down to speed and cost.”

But that does not mean professionals in the influencer space need dash off to other careers. The rise of these tools may just mean that content creators can leverage them to make better content at a faster speed to create more value, if they can jump on mastering them soon enough. And while doing this isn’t necessarily easy, Detert has some advice for creators wondering how to get started.

“Figure out the small things with ChatpGPT, Dall-E, and other ones like that. Play with it, find a way to apply it to your business, understand it,” said Detert when asked about how creators can leverage AI. And from there, he suggests allowing conceptual mastery of these tools and the trends around them guide how those with online presences can grow their brands intelligently in this new reality.

I recently spoke further with Detert to learn about how his company works with brands and creators, discuss his own history, and ask how he sees AI shifting this entire industry now and years down the line.

Anhar Karim: So your company uses AI to pair the right creator with the right brand. Can you explain how your service does that?

Ryan Detert: To reach to the past for a brief second, the reason I have this company is because in 2010-2012 I had 30 million followers on Twitter and Instagram. I had meme accounts, or niche accounts. So for example I owned @travel, @automative, [and] @fashion. I realized very quickly [that] for us to get the dollar from these big brands we had to validate media, brand safety, measurements, and deliver back an ROI for these campaigns.

So Influential was born.

And about halfway through that journey, in 2015-2016, is the AI. We partnered with IBM Watson. We were connected to them because we were heading into a campaign for the Super Bowl for KIA for Christopher Walken. It was a big moment for us, and we wanted to find the best way [to determine] what is the exact right person? So that was the first iteration of it. We then elevated it to, essentially, lookalikes. You drop in a handle for a creator and find 10 just like them. So it depends on what the client wants to do, but essentially whether it’s a brief, or a person, or an account they want to mimic, we use AI to identify based on those different variables and it populates accordingly.

So that’s what we’re doing. We’re on hundreds of millions of dollars a year in campaigns. And while there is both ML and AI in our technology, it’s still AI as Augmented Intelligence. Which is a mixture of machine learning plus human perception. Because if it gives you the exact right parameters, that person might not exactly feel right based on the client. So we have to go back and forth, and then we re-feed it back into the system and get more and more creators. So it’s one of those iterative processes.

Karim: Is there general advice you have for how a creator should present themselves to better match with brands on your platform?

Detert: Manifest the brands you want to work with. You talk about how much you love XYZ fitness brand, then our system will populate [you] towards the top because we’ll know you spoke about them recently, [with] positive sentiment, x number of times, across multiple platforms, stories, reels, etc.

The more that you are a regular fan of something, the more a brand goes, ‘I want to work with them.’ Live your life, talk about your things you care most about.

Karim: But is there a brand safety element to this? You mention elsewhere your system scanning for profanity and providing letter grades similar to MPAA ratings.

Detert: Yeah, it’s the Hippocratic oath like doctors: Do no harm. If you’re going to curse, [there] better be a good reason for it. Because drop in a certain number of S-Bombs or F-Bombs and they’ll put you in a certain category. Nudity, profanity, hate speech—even political speech puts a flag. And listen brands might not care if it’s one way or the other.

And then we even check for the offline side [such as] felony charges. Listen, anything you can think of that a brand would say, ‘Why would I not spend money on a person as opposed to a 30-second ad?’ we’ve had to check those boxes.

Karim: I want to ask you now about the AI tools that are becoming available to creators. There’s ChatGPT. There’s music generation tools. There’s image generation and more. So, in your view, how should creators be utilizing these things for their work?

Detert: I’ll take a step back—what we’re doing with our clients is we’re saying we have thousands of campaigns per year. And the campaign can be as few as 5-10 pieces of content, to hundreds of pieces of content. And while the briefs are somewhat familiar, they’re always sub-optimized for fitness, fashion, influencers themselves, platform, etc. So we’re using ChatGPT to be able to do that, whether it’s creating a brief from scratch or creating one that’s hyper specific to different verticals.

So maybe that’s going to happen both ways. So if I was a creator I could simply say, “I need to appeal to a 35-45 [year old] audience base for a soda company with this hashtag [and] this tagline, what should I do on Instagram, ChatGPT? So what we’re doing on our side, they can do it individually.

And then in about a year to two years, I think we’ll see a big renaissance in the overall creator space. [Because] in a perfect world, if I was a content creator, I could literally type [an idea] into whatever [and it] puts me and another creator in a video—us on the beach holding hands with a bottle in between—and that [would] actually be generated. Problem is who owns that? Usage rights, it’s a whole thing.

The technology is not quite there for the masses. I think if you did it in a very private scenario you could probably get one of those things built out using existing technology. But in about a year or so there will be a time when we, as a scale play, can go create large amounts of content iteratively. I think we’ll still have to have a human review it to make sure it’s not something crazy (laughs). But, to me, that inherently has to happen. There’s no future where this doesn’t happen in some fashion. The question will come down to speed and cost.

Karim: So knowing where you’re saying AI is going, is there a possibility, or is it already happening, where a brand is creating their own AI-generated content creator without hiring any actual human influencer behind it?

Detert: So we’ve been doing virtual avatar campaigns since 2018. With the most advanced version that we have been running for campaigns we had a virtual creator go live using a mo-cap suit, speak to an audience, talk about the product, and also be funny and dance.

So a human can become a virtual creator very simply, very inexpensively. The next iteration is can you then recreate that through AI? And the answer is yes. We’re at the precipice where you have to connect the strings together to make it all work, but yes.

Karim: How would you advise influencers working today, then, to be prepared to pivot around that change?

Detert: Crawl, walk, run. The crawl is figure out the small things that ChatGPT, Dall-E, and other ones like that [can do]. Play with it, find a way to apply it to your business, understand it.

The walk/run of it all—if I was a major celebrity or someone that had millions of followers and I had an eye on the future the first thing I would do is make IP that’s not just myself.

Because no matter what, if you’re a fashionista who’s known for trying on clothes and having a haute lifestyle, [people] will still want to see that. But if you have a runway model virtual avatar that is some sort of extravagant version of yourself, you then now have another IP that you can sell to brands with deals.

And then at some point the cost of that will shrink. You go from a production cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per video, to thousands of dollars, to maybe cents of a dollar because it’s 1677250626 just simply an app.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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