The increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) in many industries, brand marketing included, has raised some important issues regarding trust, authenticity, and reputational damage, in a new study led by a Northeastern University in London researcher.
Specifically, Sian Joel-Edgar, associate professor in human-centered computing, has found that AI-powered influencers have the potential to damage brand reputation more than their human equivalents, according to the results of a study published in February in the Journal of Business Research.
As it happens, the study, called ‘Virtual influencers in social media versus the metaverse: mind Perception, blame judgments and brand trust,’ questions the implications of using virtual influencers to help brands sell their products, as opposed to human influencers using their popularity to advertise brands.
Per the findings, there’s likely to be more reputational damage to a brand’s trust if AI-powered influencers – rather than their human equivalents – are selling a product that a consumer is unhappy with. Hence, the professor said that brands must keep tight control over the virtual influencers they employ.
Indeed, virtual influencers, created by developers, advertise brands in the metaverse, where users, typically represented by avatars, interact through visual headsets with other humans and AI alike. However, some AI influencers have attained such a massive following that they now advertise brands outside of the virtual world.
AI influencer conundrum
One of them is Miquela Silva, also known as Lil Miquela, a fictional celebrity and model designed and operated by the Los Angeles-based technology startup Brud. She promotes a range of primarily fashion-related brands to her nearly 3 million Instagram followers. As Joel-Edgar pointed out, as the epitome of the future, “Miquela has represented Prada and L’Oreal’s new futuristic cosmetics and beauty ranges.”
“Something that has interested me is the artificial nature of what we’re being presented in the media – people being airbrushed and being made to look very beautiful. (…) Well, virtual influencers are the extreme end of that. It’s that uncanny valley of where things seem eerie in that they’re actually perfect, from their skin texture to their symmetry. And I thought, I wonder how people will react to this? So that’s how it started – that interest in what it means to be human, with virtual influencers being a quite extreme version of that.”
That said, the true nature of these virtual influencers, as in the case of Lil Miquela, is not always fully revealed or is sometimes even misrepresented to the public. There’s also the question of how to hold them responsible in the same way as the real-life influencers for the content of their posts.
Case in point: the social media content showing Miquela Silva ‘visiting’ a deli in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic, appearing to bypass the strict coronavirus restrictions, which raised eyebrows and questions around transparency and trust in the intentions of virtual influencers and their designers.
Furthermore, moral responsibility usually requires a perceived agency that virtual influencers – created by human designers and governed by algorithms – lack. Considering that consumers often view businesses as moral entities capable of ethical and unethical actions, the blame for a virtual influencer’s misconduct could endanger a brand’s reputation.
The researchers – who included Soumyadeb Chowdhury from the TBS Business School in Toulouse, France; Peter Nagy from Arizona State University; and Shuang Ren from Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland – have found that users were likely to attribute more blame on a human influencer versus a virtual influencer following a negative experience, as they regarded the human as having “more agency and experience.”
However, AI-powered influencers, regarded as being less responsible for their actions, had the potential to negatively impact brand trust more significantly as the result of a similar experience.
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