Hurae, the Brussels agency which invents new things in marketing through storytelling, has launched its latest creation. Her name ? Bobbi Lee. Designed from A to Z by artificial intelligence applications, Bobbi Lee represents the first Belgian virtual influencer active on Instagram. However, this is not its primary function. In his Instagram biography, it is specified that this fictional character is an intern at Hurae.
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Successful scenarios
Bobbi Lee is a larger-than-life influencer. She has style with her red locks and her nose piercing, she is smiling and she acts out in various situations. On her Instagram account, still created by Hurae, we see her testing the Knees To Chin spring rolls with the caption “I finally tried a place you suggested“. She addresses her community as any content creator could. In two other publications, we observe her respectively in a clothing store alongside a friend, but also on the Grand Place of Brussels, a cone of fries in hand The result is astonishing even if we perceive in certain posts that it is a “fake” person Bobbi Lee has accumulated 412 followers since. the launch of his account on April 5.
Hannes Coudenys, creative director of Hurae, has been working on the creation of this character alongside his team since 2016. “At that time, it was very difficult to create this project. The budget for this technology was too high”. Eight years later, artificial Bobbi Lee was created in just one week, at no cost. “With AI applications, it is possible to create your own character. Anyone could get into this. We are now trying to improve our model.”
What is the goal of this project?
The principle of creating these digital people is to develop a new way of doing storytelling according to the creative director of Hurae. “Social media AIs are already popular in other countries. We also want to create a person who does not exist to test all the possibilities that this brings.”
Among these examples abroad, platforms promoting the publication of sexual content which host many false identities of people created with artificial intelligence. Many experts therefore raise the question of ethics and the sexualization of the female body. Hannes Coudenys assures us that they are aware of this problem. Besides, Bobbi Lee is not the creators’ fantasy. “This is the student who is doing her internship within the company that published Bobbi Lee” he tells us.
Will AI influence take over?
Does Bobbi Lee therefore constitute a danger for “real” content creators? These professions have become truly democratized for several years now. For Julien Latinis, COO of Efluenz, an influencer marketing agency, real influencers are not going to disappear. “The human side takes precedence over AI. For example, if a real influencer tests a restaurant, he will talk to us more passionately about his experience while the AI will not share these emotions and will instead promote”, explains the influence expert.
According to him, artificial influences can be dangerous for consumers in the future. The ideal would be to have a framework and regulation of these new practices, to frame and regulate the virtual world in order to set limits as in the real world.
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