AI INFLUENCE
Automating authenticity: probabilistic storytelling and AI influencers on social media
Project
The proliferation of AI influencers on social media unsettles one of the core organizing logics of the Web 2.0 era: authenticity.
Since the early 2000s, authenticity has been a key currency of the creator economy whereby the affective labor, self-expression, and visibility of content creators and influencers is leveraged in service of brand campaigns and digital marketing. Encompassing AI-generated doubles of human creators, entirely fictional avatars, and various shades of gray in between, AI influencers both deepen and refigure the function of authenticity discourse on social media platforms, which have increasingly been oriented less around sociality and more around the consumption of content at scale.
The MSCA project AI INFLUENCE investigates the implications of these shifts through ethnographic research among those creating and deploying AI influencers, primarily on Instagram and TikTok, along with other platforms like Reddit and Skool where AI influencer creators share practical and technical know-how. The project positions AI influencer creators as entrepreneurial bellwethers of "post-authenticity", which it defines as an emerging platform logic that recodes authenticity in terms of affective plausibility, vibe, and resonance rather than autobiographical referentiality. Considering how post-authenticity represents the further operationalization of authenticity after the advent of generative AI, the project investigates its role in an emerging form of affective capitalism co-evolving with social media and generative AI platforms.
Objectives
- Conceptualize the emergence of post-authenticity through a critical genealogy of authenticity and its relation to the logics of capital, particularly under post-Fordism and into the era of platform capitalism
- Investigate through ethnographic research attuned to social practices and everyday online/offline life how post-authenticity shapes and is shaped by the aspirational labor of AI influencer creators (and sometimes the invisibilized labor of other human collaborators), along with AI capabilities and logics, and social media affordances and algorithms
- Consider the gendered dimension of post-authentic aspirations, labor, and storytelling in terms of the long-standing division between reproductive and productive labor through which feminized affective labor continues to be exploited and made a target for automation
Outputs
Conferences and seminars
- 15/09/2026. “Synthetic Skool: AI Influencer Courses and Entrepreneurial Know-How in the AI Creator Economy”. Knowing-AI: Anthropological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Knowledge Production With and Beyond Artificial Intelligence conference (14-16 Sept, 2026) at the University of Tübingen.
- 23/07/2026. Co-convenor of Polarized Digital Images: On Computer Vision in Visual Anthropology panel at EASA 2026 conference (21-24 July, 2026), Adam Mickiewitz University, Poznań.
- 21/07/2026. “Artificial Influencers, Authentic Creators: Splitting the Aspirational Self in the AI Creator Economy”. Panel presentation as part of “Aspirations and the Digital: Strategies, Contestations, and Fractures in Contemporary Social Worlds” panel at EASA 2026 conference (21-24 July, 2026), Adam Mickiewitz University, Poznań.
- 12/06/2026. “Generating Post-Authenticity: AI Influencers, Persona Branding, and Affective Capitalism”. Lecture part of KIME seminar From Algomaxxing to AI Influencers at the Center for Digital Narratives, University of Bergen.
- 5/06/2026. “Generating Post-Authenticity: AI Influencers, Persona Branding, and Affective Capitalism”. Lecture part of Critical AI Studies Seminar at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
- 3/02/2026. “Auto-MAGA: LLMs as Anti-Woke Meme Machines”. Panel presentation at The World Algorithm Symposium, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Recorded talks
- 3/02/2026. “Auto-MAGA: LLMs as Anti-Woke Meme Machines”. Panel presentation at The World Algorithm Symposium, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
From AI-generated imagery to right-leaning chatbots, the capabilities of LLMs are being leveraged in the context of the US culture wars to combat the perceived dangers of “wokeness”. The uptake of generative AI tools by the American far-right, now often encapsulated by the MAGA acronym, builds on the opportunistic embrace of the affordances of social media a decade prior by an emergent alt-right whose sociotechnical practices of “memetic warfare” supposedly memed Trump into his first term as president. This presentation centers on the production and circulation of anti-woke AI memes on X, considering how they reflect and extend a post-truth epistemic environment predicated on affective resonance. It argues the proliferation of such AI memes, which circulate not necessarily because they are perceived to be real but because they feel true, supports an understanding of post-truth politics as an expression of desire rather than simply a problem of disinformation. Analyzing how anti-woke AI memes reimagine past, present, and future, the presentation highlights affective-temporal affinities between fascist metapolitics, memetic media, and LLMs. It frames generative AI as a sort of meme machine to underscore how MAGA functions as a neofascist fandom fueled by a palingenetic memetics that LLMs are structurally suited to augment.
