AI avatars will challenge humans in the creator economy

More than 200 million people compete in the creator economy today—but it’s about to get even more cutthroat. It won’t be long until anyone can form a digital human born from artificial intelligence.

Creator platforms and startups are rapidly readying AI-powered services that will allow influencers to digitally clone themselves, or anyone to simply generate an AI avatar that looks and talks like a human.

These include Google’s Veo 2 for YouTube, Meta’s AI Studio for Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok’s Symphony Avatars (as well as OmniHuman from TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance), plus OpenAI’s Sora, Pika, Runway, Luma, HeyGen, Synthesia, and Pollo AI.

In previews of this technology, generating hyper-realistic videos only takes some text prompts, photos, and/or audio clips. As such, numerous safeguards are required to avoid potential deepfake abuse and ensure proper consent and compliance, which is why we haven’t seen the floodgates opened yet. But the tech is already capable of producing stunningly realistic results, as recent demos from Meta and Veo 2 early adopters have shown.

As development accelerates—many of the major platforms are expected to release AI-powered clone and avatar capabilities to the public this year—creators should brace for impact. Once digital doppelgangers are here, it will spell trouble, eating into creators’ ability to attract attention and grow their income.

Grasping for attention among AI-generated content

Creators are largely split on making digital clones of themselves (39% are comfortable vs. 44% uncomfortable). Why would creators want a clone in the first place?

The vast majority of them (92%) are already using GenAI tools, setting the groundwork for making this leap. Clones could also be attractive to creators since taking breaks or digital detoxes is difficult when your livelihood depends on your omnipresence online. Another promising application is scaling content globally, allowing English-speaking influencers to connect with audiences beyond their native tongue, and vice versa.

But human creators and their clones will need to share already-crowded stages online with AI avatars. This technology will likely mint a flood of opportunistic “creators”—hustlers operating behind the scenes who aren’t talented, funny, or charming enough to be legit creators, but see an opportunity to make money by generating AI avatars from scratch that have no connection to any real person.

Expect these opportunists to wield AI as a brute-force instrument to clog up algorithms, generating content faster than human creators can. The oncoming avalanche of AI avatars will threaten to take attention away from human creators, even those who use the tech to their advantage and create identical twins of themselves.

There’s no mistaking that AI influencers will lack the authenticity, empathy and relatability that gives human creators their fame. But sadly that may not matter. Creators are already competing for attention among the AI slop that’s become pervasive across platforms like Pinterest and Instagram Reels. This AI-generated content regularly racks up impressive view counts and engagement, indicating audiences may not care all that much about how “real” what they’re consuming is.

The battle for monetization

Almost all Gen Z adults (88%) report following at least one influencer on social media and many trust them for brand recommendations, contributing to a fast-growing creator economy that will surpass over half a trillion dollars by 2030.

The test for creators will be whether consumers will still follow their clones’ recommendations for purchasing real-world products, as well as recommendations from AI avatars. Advertising dollars always follow conversion metrics. When the influencer isn’t always “real” anymore, what happens?

On the bright side, it will open up more avenues for monetization for human creators. The 24/7 “always-on” nature of the digital clone opens infinite possibilities for long-tail personalization. Think offering Cameo-like customized video messages or even “live” video chat sessions with the clone. These initiatives could be executed at scale and concurrently, removing the bottlenecks faced as a solo creator. Creators could charge less for these types of experiences with their AI replicas and a premium when it’s themselves. This is just one way digital clones could reduce creators’ reliance on brand promotions for income.

Ready, set, clone

That may be needed since creators may face fresh competition from brands that decide to spawn their own AI influencers in-house that they can fully control and pay less. And as previously mentioned, human creators will be in hand-to-hand combat with a deluge of AI avatars from opportunistic creators. While these avatars may not attract lots of brand dollars, they could compete on creator payouts from the platforms themselves with the reach and engagement they generate.

Early results on Instagram show human creators are more engaging than AI influencers—although the latter tend to be more stylized and caricatures than the hyper-realistic influencers that will be spawned. Consumers still seem to want that human in the loop, showing promise for using AI as an extension of a creator rather than AI fully forming an influencer from scratch. For now, human creators have a leg up in “the clone wars,” but vibes can shift quickly.

We’re not far from a world where every creator has a powerful AI companion at their disposal. How consumers will ultimately react to clones of creators and avatars of AI opportunists remains to be seen. It’s hard not to see how creators that use AI to their advantage, while preserving authenticity, could vastly extend their engagement, reach, and income—but they’ll face fresh competition from an onslaught of opportunistic creators.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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