[ExI] the future gets uglier

[William Flynn Wallace]

Companies are apparently getting tired of paying social media “influencers”
big bucks to tout their products. Enter artificial intelligence. Japanese
startup Aww Inc. has introduced Imma, whose bright pink hair and “goofy
dance moves” brought her 300,000 followers on Instagram — and landed the
company seven figures in seed funding to develop more bots, including
Imma’s “brother,” Plustic Boy. The company says Imma was actually started
as an art project, but companies wanted to sponsor her. Virtual influencers
“have real business potential,” says Christopher Travers, who runs a
website reporting on the trend. “They are cheaper to work with than humans
in the long term, are 100% controllable, can appear in many places at once,
and, most importantly, they never age or die.”   bill w
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