Full Guide on Creating an AI Influencer

With each passing day, it feels like we’re more firmly planted in the AI era. Despite some concerns – job displacement, the future of human creativity and authenticity, privacy issues – AI is soaring ever higher, more evolved and ready to match our every need. And truth be told, it’s hard to resist. AI saves us time and energy, and helps us focus on those tasks that absolutely need our human touch. 
 

As a solo entrepreneur or creator or even a brand founder trying to scale up your business, multi-tasking has probably become second nature, and for good reason. To make your life easier, your focus should be on trying to optimize your schedule and automate whatever you can. 
 

Enter the AI influencer – an AI-powered virtual persona that you can customize to your specific needs and preferences, who can represent, promote, even celebrate your brand on social media day and night if need be, and who comes with a level of flexibility that human influencers can rarely match. 

Why create an AI influencer? 

Let’s start with a disclaimer: don’t create an AI influencer because it’s the “trendy” thing to do. Tempting as it may be to jump on this particular bandwagon, take some time to figure out if this makes strategic sense for your business.
 

That being said, there are a lot of reasons why many brands out there have already created AI influencers (very successfully so, I might add). Here’s a few: 

• Full creative control

Humans, by nature, are rather unpredictable. Everything, from our personality to our religious and political beliefs, can shape our outlook of the world, and how we talk about them. And that, of course, extends to influencers.

Working with human influencers can be quite rewarding, but extremely risky at the same time. A poorly worded post, an off-brand opinion, or a past controversy resurfacing at the worst possible time – and your campaign is kaput. Suddenly, you’re neck deep in damage control, when all you ever wanted is to draw more positive attention to your product.
 

An AI influencer can be shaped into a virtual, scandal-immune, highly predictable brand ambassador. With the right AI tools, you can give any AI model the personality, voice and setting you want with just a few prompts, no awkward feedback loops or tense negotiations. 
 

• Non-stop content

The best thing about AI influencers? They don’t need rest. Since they are entirely fabricated entities – essentially, just a set of pixels on your screen – they don’t need breaks, sleep, or time off. 
 

Once you’re done with the initial setup – building and customizing your AI model influencer, creating a content plan for their social media posts (captions included) etc. – you can basically let it run on auto-pilot. You can even set your AI influencer to respond to follower comments in real time – keeping that engagement rates high and climbing!
 

• Global reach

If you’re thinking of having your business expand into new markets, or at least having a more diverse audience on social media – AI influencers are looking like the smartest solution. Simply creating an AI influencer and customizing it so it speaks in multiple languages fluently depending on your needs, is much less stressful (and cheaper!) than searching for human influencers who speak the right languages. 
 

P.S. Alternatively, you can use Flixier’s AI Translator to quickly dub your videos in 130 languages. Just saying. 
 

• Endless creative opportunities

The human element in any kind of marketing content is precious, there’s no denying that. But it’s also quite limiting. There are only so many types of stories you can tell with real-world influencers, without making a crater in your budget and spending hours on detailed briefs, feedback and fee negotiations. 

With an AI influencer, there’s absolutely no shortage of storytelling techniques, fantasy or surreal identities you can explore with a few well-worded prompts and some professional AI design tools. 

7 steps to building an AI influencer

Creating an AI influencer from scratch may sound daunting, but once you break down all the steps, it might be surprisingly straightforward and doable. The key is to be strategic and thoughtful in how you bring it to life. From carefully defining a target audience, developing a unique, relatable, on-brand identity for your influencer, to picking the right tools to design and customize it, and gently guiding and monitoring its journey in the social media space.
 

Let’s take it step by step. 

Choose your target audience & buyer personas

The first step in shaping your AI influencer is figuring out who it’s speaking to. 
 

Quick disclaimer: You might have heard it before, but I’ll say it again: your target audience can’t be everyone. This applies to AI influencers as much as it does to any other type of marketing strategy. As much as you’d want everyone to be interested in your content/product/service, the reality is that some people will be more naturally drawn to it, while others will steer clear of it because it doesn’t serve them in any way. 

So, define your target audience by asking yourself this direct question: who are your products/services most suited for and what are their main interests and online behavior?
 

Let’s say you have a makeup brand like MAC. Most likely, your products (and social media content, implicitly) will most likely catch the eyes of young women who usually use such products in their day-to-day life. Now, you should never operate on assumptions alone and always look into your audience demographics data (every social media platform shares this type of insights) to confirm that you’re on the right track.
 

With that in mind, you start drafting some buyer personas, aka more detailed profiles of your ideal customers. For instance, for the makeup brand example mentioned above, one buyer persona could look something like this:
 

• Zoe, aged 18-25 (Gen Z), is always on top of the latest fashion trends, active on TikTok and Instagram, and enjoys bold, fun social media content.

Once you’ve defined your target audience and outlined a few buyer personas, you can customize your AI influencer’s look, voice and messaging to appeal to this kind of users.

Define your AI influencer's personality and arc

Everybody loves a good background story, and in the case of AI influencers, this part is key for making them believable and real. Defining its traits, personality quirks and long-term arc is the best way to make them easy to connect to. 
 

Based on your target audience and buyer persona insights, you can start crafting a distinct personality for your influencer, giving it depth and relatability. And it all begins with the right questions: 
 

• Are they playful and energetic, or professional and focused?
• Are they confident and bold, or warm and empathetic?
• Do they have any unique traits or signature catchphrases?

Experiment with different answers to these questions, and add more of your own if needed, and once you feel you have sketched the ideal picture of your future AI influencer, you can move on to the next step: designing it!

Develop your influencer using advanced AI tools 

Here’s where the real fun begins. With a few AI tools you can build your AI influencer from scratch, start racking up views and engagement, and even generate revenue down the line. 
 

Here’s how I created an AI influencer in a few steps:
 

Building the base model

To start, you’re going to need a base model, which you can change and customize in endless ways. I decided to use Midjourney, a generative AI tool that works through Discord.
 

Disclaimer: To have full access to Midjourney’s features, you will need a subscription (the most affordable plan starts at $10/month). There are some free alternatives out there, but I chose Midjourney for its flexibility and creative control.
 

Once I logged into Discord, I added the Midjourney bot to my own server (I recommend setting up a new server just for this project). To guide the AI, I found a reference photo of a famous actress and saved it to my computer. Then, I used the /describe command in Midjourney, uploaded the image, and got multiple descriptions.
 

I clicked "Imagine All", which prompted the AI to generate original images based on those descriptions. I picked one that felt just right for my AI influencer. 
 

Generating variations of the AI model

There are a few ways to create an ever-growing collection of images featuring your influencer in different scenarios and settings. The easiest way is to take the original prompt and tweak it slightly, adding small details, like outfits, backgrounds, or poses. This should keep the influencer’s look consistent while adding some variety. You can do this as many times as you want.
 

A more creative and scalable way is to integrate InsightFace – an AI tool that lets you swap your model’s face onto different images. Once I integrated it into Discord, I used the /faceswap command to add my AI influencer’s face to various web images. Again, this step can be repeated as many times as you need.
 

Bringing your AI influencer to life with video

To make my AI influencer more realistic, I wanted to give her the option to walk, talk, and laugh – much like a real person, so I turned to Akool, a tool that allows for face-swapping in a variety of formats, including video.
 

Disclaimer: Akool is also a paid app, but you get 100 free credits which you can use to try it out and get some usable assets.

To start, I needed a base video. Luckily, Flixier’s stock media library is full of stock videos you can use, so I chose a model that resembled my AI influencer and exported the video. 
 

Then swapped her face with the image of AI influencers and got a brand new video featuring my AI influencer. 
 

Depending on the tools you choose to work with, your process might look different but it will likely include the same steps. 

Choose your target social media platforms

With your AI influencer already created, it’s time to pick their online headquarters. This step will depend largely on your social media goals and the type of content you plan / you’re able to create. As a quick note, when it comes to AI influencers, photo-focused platforms might be an easier starting point than video-first platforms.  
 

While many top AI influencers hang out on Instagram and YouTube, that doesn’t mean other platforms aren’t valid options. 
 

As a rule of thumb, if you’re chasing virality, TikTok is a great choice. For more curated content and brand partnership opportunities, Instagram is the way to go. And if you’re ready to dive into long-form content, YouTube might be a perfect space.

Define a marketing plan, goals and KPIs

Just like any other social media account, your AI influencer’s presence should not be random, but instead a part of a solid strategy. Everything, from posting frequency to tone of voice, should be mapped out before they share their first post. 
 

Next, you should decide what your AI influencer is working towards (aka their main mission). Do you want them to build hype around your brand, get brand deals (like Kira here) or create monetizable content? Depending on the goals you set, be sure to also prioritize some KPIs to monitor (e.g. post impressions for awareness or estimated revenue for video content).
 

If you don’t pick some relevant social media metrics to track, you won’t have a clear idea of whether your AI influencer is making a splash on social media or just getting by.  

Set up a content calendar

Consistency is important – not just in the way your AI influencer looks and talks, but also in how often they pop up on other people’s feeds. Creating a content calendar to map out all their posts for each month is key for making sure they never run out of ideas. But more importantly, it gives you the time you need to prepare all the necessary AI visuals and content. 

Start posting & measuring engagement

And just like that, your AI influencer is ready to go live! Once you create a social media account and start posting, the monitoring phase begins. You might notice that the type of content people engage with could be different than what you'd expect from a human influencer account. 

Measuring engagement is key for knowing when and how to tweak your strategy in order to make your AI influencer more in tune with their audience. 

Benefits of working with an AI influencer

AI influencers can be quite a delight to work with, despite being a group of carefully curated pixels on a screen. Although it’s better to see them as being in a league of their own, the comparison with human influencers is inevitable. 
 

Here are some of the key benefits of working with AI influencers compared to their human counterparts:
 

• No drama

Since an AI influencer is an entirely fabricated digital entity – it doesn’t have thoughts, personal opinions or emotions that could lead to conflicts or even controversies. This means you can fully focus on your content without having to worry about unpredictable human behavior. 
 

• Worldwide availability

In contrast with human influencers, AI influencers are not bound by time zones or personal schedules. They can get to work at any hour of the day and night, and you can program it to share content or engage with the community at peak activity hours.
 

• Easy on the budget

While there may be some start-up costs associated with AI tools needed to design and develop your influencer, it’s nothing compared to having to pay salaries, travel and accommodations expenses and other unexpected fees for human influencers. Cost-effectiveness is one of the biggest reasons why so many brands are turning to AI influencing nowadays.