It’s not just coders and content writers that AI is replacing — influencers could be next on the list.
A Chinese influencer has managed to sell goods worth $7.6 million during a 6-year livestream using an AI avatar of himself. Luo Yonghao, one of China’s top livestreamers, debuted his digital avatar on Baidu’s e-commerce platform. The stream was powered by ERNIE foundation model, and Baidu said it was the first instance of a livestream featuring dual digital avatars as co-hosts.
The stream went on for 6 hours, and racked up 13 million views. During the stream, the digital AI avatars convinced real human beings to buy goods worth 55 million RMB (7.6 million USD). The stream also saw 97k characters of product descriptions.
“Powered by ERNIE 4.5 Turbo, our digital avatar tech is capable of multimodal planning and deep-thinking-based script generation. This drives synchronized coordination across voice, visuals, expressions, and interaction, resulting in a highly lifelike and expressive AI host,” Baidu said on X. “The (AI avatars) were describing the products, responding to live user comments, answering questions, and having a bit of banter! Just like in a real-human livestream,” it added.
It’s a pretty remarkable development. Granted that Luo Yonghao was already an established influencer, but 13 million people tuned in to watch a digital avatar of his speak for 6 hours. Not only did they watch the livestream and engage with it with comments, they also reached into their wallets and ended up buying goods worth $7.6 million. Until not too recently, digital avatars didn’t cross the uncanny valley — the digital likenesses felt weirdly non-human, which made people not want to interact and watch them. But Baidu seems to have shown that people are now ready to consume content for long periods featuring these digital avatars. This could change many industries — not only could human influencers use these AI avatars to potentially stream themselves 24*7, it could also give birth to fully AI-influencers who don’t exist in the real world. In addition, sectors like acting and modelling too could end up seeing big changes. We live in interesting times, and it’s getting harder and harder to think of industries that could possibly remain immune from the AI revolution.