AI influencers are ‘everywhere’ at Coachella

Coachella kicked off on Friday, and as usual, it’s the place to be for online influencers looking to show off their memorable experiences at the festival. A quick scroll through my social media feeds has already shown me many uncannily attractive figures in glitzy outfits, posing for perfectly staged photographs with celebrities.

Only some of these content creators aren’t really there. They don’t even exist at all outside of our screens. They’re generated using AI tools.

Faking Coachella attendance is nothing new — even real influencers have been doing so in recent years — but generative AI has now progressed to the point where it’s become much harder to pick these synthetic creators out amid the flood of real festival attendees. Some make little effort to hide that the “faces” of such social media accounts are entirely synthetic, tagging their bios and posts with disclosures that proudly identify the page’s personas as so-called “digital creators,” a term that obscures whether the person is AI or simply online. Others I can identify just by using my eyeballs, no disclosures needed.

Ammarathegoat is most likely one such AI influencer trying to sell a false reality to its over 170,000 Instagram followers. Images posted by the account, which has no AI disclosure in the bio, show what looks like an AI-generated avatar posing for pictures with members of the Kardashian/Jenner family and real human content creators like Bretman Rock and James Charles, all with recognizable scenes of Coachella structures in the background. There’s no AI information available from Meta or the creator on any of these posts, but the visual distortions on images and videos (both current and older examples) strongly suggest that Ammarathegoat is AI-generated.

Another Instagram account posting Coachella snaps with the Kardashians/Jenners is Grannyspills, an avatar made with Higgsfield AI according to the creator bio, that’s amassed more than 2 million followers. Like Ammarathegoat, video content posted by Grannyspills moves unnaturally, and images carry other signature AI tells, like being too polished or depicting the avatar with inconsistent body shapes. While the account is also labeled as a “digital creator,” none of the images or videos it’s posted include a clear disclosure beyond an “AI info” tag hidden under the three-dot menu on Instagram’s mobile app. On the desktop version, I can’t see any AI labels at all.

A pattern I’ve observed is that accounts running female-presenting AI avatars like to avoid mentioning that the unnaturally beautiful women you’re seeing aren’t real. A notable exception is Lil Miquela, one of the biggest AI influencers to date, which notably “interviewed” J Balvin for Coachella in 2019, and is back “at” the festival again this year. Meanwhile, Miazelu and Anazelu — two other Instagram accounts with 252,000 and 312,000 followers, respectively — have posted pictures together that are near indistinguishable from those of actual festivalgoers, with casual shots showing believable backgrounds that depict the event. Both accounts describe themselves as AI influencers in their bio, but omit that information across every image or video they’ve published.

It’s easy to understand why these accounts, and many others with fewer followers, are pretending to attend Coachella. California’s festival has already been described as the “Influencer Olympics,” in which content creators compete against each other to secure brand sponsorships and agency representation or simply grow their audiences of remote spectators. Including famous faces in such posts is likely a tactic to increase the reach of these accounts, or to prey on existing fan bases for those actual celebrities.

That potential audience boost also applies to social media accounts that offer more sexualized services on other platforms. One Instagram account that links to an OnlyFans page has posted two images of themself with Coachella headliner Justin Bieber, supposedly taken during the festival. I can’t verify if this is a real person as, again, there are no AI disclosures on the account, but these images may appear to other Instagram users who search for what Bieber was doing during the event.

Many people in the comments can’t tell either. “Does Hailey know about this! Yikes,” replied one commenter. “idk! They weren’t together at the time,” the account responded. This is either more ammunition for the Dead Internet theory, or people are more gullible than I assumed.

Nikki Bellini, an adult-themed AI influencer that directs social media followers to subscribe to its Fanvue account — an OnlyFans-like service that appears friendlier to AI content — made a stir last year after its creator reportedly received “hundreds” of invitations to meet up at Coachella in person.

This year other AI-generated “Fanvue Ambassadors” like Fit_aitana have jumped on the trend, showing convincing festival fakery to its almost 400,000 Instagram followers. Fit_aitana describes itself as a “virtual soul” rather than an AI avatar, but it’s still fake, which is rarely disclosed on any content posted to the account. A cursory look on X also reveals that Ammarathegoat has an OnlyFans account, a platform that doesn’t explicitly ban AI-generated content, but requires creators to verify their identity. That profile, too, lacks any AI disclosures.

Instagram users either haven’t noticed or just don’t care. “Looks like you had the absolute best time ❤️,” one commenter said on Fit_aitana’s Coachella post. “jealous = me.”

Even when there are no external services to link to, AI-generated boobs have been plastered across Coachella hashtags on Instagram with no disclosures, though sometimes the number of boobs is a giveaway.

I’ve found that male-presenting AI influencers are more inclined to disclose that they’re not real humans, but only because they want to sell you something else: the means to make your own AI mimics. They’re pitching prompting guides and AI content systems that users can buy to create their own fake influencers or utilize premade avatars using flashy Coachella visuals.

Any influencer coverage of a pop culture event can feel performative these days given the chance to monetize any such opportunities, but the involvement of fake influencers, with no clear disclosures, feels like it’s taking advantage of people who are unable to attend events like Coachella in person. Now we can’t even reliably enjoy the event from afar without questioning how much of what we’re seeing is actually taking place. And now that some of these synthetic creators have reached internet micro-celebrity status, it seems likely the trend will continue.

Brands are already reportedly spending “into the high six figures” to send real human creators to Coachella — I imagine that investing in false realities may be far cheaper, in every sense of the word. If brands are interested in splashing sponsorship deals across AI-generated faces, they may not be bothered about such fakery being disclosed to their potential consumers. Perhaps those consumers won’t notice, or even care.