Both of these influencers are successful

In some ways, Gigi is similar to other young social media influencers.

With perfect hair and makeup, she logs in to talk to her fans. She shares her diet, skin care, clips of herself applying lipstick, and more. She also has a cute baby who appears in some videos.

But after a few seconds, something may look a little different.

You can also munch on pizza made from molten lava and apply snowflakes and cotton candy as lip gloss. Her hands sometimes go through what she's holding.

That's because Gigi isn't real. She was created using AI by Simone McKenzie, a University of Illinois student who needed to make some money over the summer.

Mackenzie, 21, is part of a fast-growing group of digital creators who churn out series of videos by inputting simple prompts into AI chatbots such as Google Veo 3. Experts say the genre, dubbed “AI slop” by some critics and viewers, is taking over social media feeds.

And its creators have achieved great success.

“I made $1,600 in just four days with one video,” McKenzie said. “I was like, okay, I want to keep this going.”

Two months later, Gigi has racked up millions of views, and Mackenzie has racked up thousands of views through TikTok's Creator Fund, a program that pays creators based on views. But experts say she's not the only one to use AI to easily go viral.

“We're seeing a surge in that trend right now, and it's probably going to continue,” said Jessa Ringel, an associate professor and digital culture expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

Its forebears now have the potential to disrupt the lucrative influencer economy by being able to generate videos of literally anything in a matter of minutes.

But while some say AI is ruining social media, others see the potential for it to democratize how people gain fame online, Ringel said. Even people who don't have the money or time to buy fancy backgrounds, camera setups, and video editing tools can still become popular.

It's only recently that social media influence has become a legitimate career path. But in just a few years, the industry has grown to be worth more than $250 billion, according to investment firm Goldman Sachs. Online creators often use things from their lives, such as vacations, pets, and makeup, to create content and gain followers.

AI creators who can make the same thing faster, cheaper, and without the constraints of reality.

“It certainly has the potential to disrupt the creator world,” said Brooke Duffy, a digital and social media scholar at Cornell University.

Gigi's creator, Mackenzie, says it only takes a few minutes to create a video, and she sometimes posts three videos a day.

That's not possible for a human influencer like Kavya Sambasivam, 26, who has about 1.3 million followers across multiple platforms.

Depending on the type of videos she creates, such as recipes, daily vlogs, or makeup tutorials, they can take anywhere from hours to days to fully produce. She has to shop, plan, set the background and lighting, shoot and edit.

AI authors can skip almost all of these steps.

“The question is, is this something we can compete with? Because I'm human. There are limits to what I can accomplish,” said Samvasivam, who is based in North Carolina. “I might be down for a few months, but I'll post the bare minimum. You can't compete with robots.”

She began building her channel while living with her parents during the coronavirus pandemic. She said she took the photo with her phone duct-taped to the wall without any setup. Ultimately, she spent the money she earned as an influencer buying tripods, lighting, makeup, and food for her videos. It took years to build her following.

Mackenzie said she considered becoming a more traditional influencer, but didn't have the money, time or preparation. That's why she created Gigi.

“I have a lot of books and stuff on my desk at home,” she said. “It's not always the most visually appealing. AI definitely makes it easier by allowing you to choose the background you want.”

When MacKenzie started her job, she turned to Google's Veo 3 chatbot and asked it to generate a woman, someone to replace her.

Gigi is 21 years old with tanned skin, green eyes, freckles, winged eyeliner, and long black hair. She then asked the chatbot to talk Gigi. Gigi then begins a video chiding commenters who accuse her of being an AI. Then, mockingly proving them right, she eats cookies made with giddy avocado and slime.

Duffy said digital alterations are not new. First, there were programs like Photoshop used for image editing. Secondly, apps like FaceTune have made it easy for users to change their faces for social media. But she said the main precursor to today's hyper-realistic AI videos was the celebrity deepfakes that emerged in the late 2010s.

But Duffy said it now looks much more authentic and can spread faster.

AI videos range from the absurd, like a cartoon of a cat working at McDonald's, to the surreal, like fake doorbell camera footage. All genres are represented, including horror, comedy, and cooking. But none of them are real.

“It's become a form of meme culture in a way,” Duffy said.

A 31-year-old American woman living in South Korea has a TikTok page featuring an AI-generated puppy named Gamja, who wears headphones, cooks, and curls her hair. Not only has she garnered millions of views, but she's also garnered partnerships from companies who want to be featured in her videos.

“We wanted to blend things people love, like food and puppies, in a way that hasn't been done before,” she said.

One of the biggest AI content creators on TikTok is 27-year-old Daniel Riley. He has an audience of millions, but they have never seen his face. Rather, his “time travel” videos have garnered around 600,000 subscribers and tens of millions of views.

“POV: You Wake Up in Pompeii on the Day of the Eruption” and “POV: You Wake Up as Queen Cleopatra” are some of his most popular titles, taking viewers into a 30-second fictional day in ancient history.

“We realized that we could tell stories that would normally cost millions to produce and let people see different eras through their mobile phones,” he said.

And he developed another source of income. It's a bootcamp that teaches others how to create similar AI videos for a monthly fee.

“Stop calling it AI,” Gigi says at the beginning of the TikTok. Although she has debates with skeptics, some audience members undoubtedly believe she is the real deal.

On the other hand, Ringel said, AI videos that are almost indistinguishable from reality pose serious problems, especially for young children who don't yet have media literacy.

“I think very soon it will be almost impossible for the average person to tell the difference,” she says. “There will be more misinformation, more fraud, more crappy content.”

On the other hand, experts say AI videos offer cartoonish and exaggerated material that can be seductive.

“It's the images and posts that seem to show the line between reality and duplicity that grab our attention and encourage us to share,” Duffy said.

According to a Harvard University survey, the majority of AI users between the ages of 14 and 22 say they use AI to generate things like images and music.

Still, the question is whether human discernment can keep up with rapidly advancing technology, she says.

Gamja's creator said he hears from people online who are concerned about AI-generated puppies almost every day. They think the puppy may be eating unhealthy food, they say – because they think they're looking at a real dog.