This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Scroll through Instagram long enough and you'll meet an influencer who isn't real. AI influencers—computer-generated personalities like Lil Miquela, who has millions of followers and has posted for Prada, Samsung and Dior—look and act like human creators, but they're entirely synthetic.
Brands like them because they never go off-script, never age and never cause a scandal. Yet they share one stubborn weakness: people tend not to trust them. New research led by Luca Cascio Rizzo, an assistant professor of marketing, points to a surprisingly simple fix—just show them with a real person.
In a new study published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Cascio Rizzo, along with Francisco Villarroel Ordenes of the University of Bologna and Jonah Berger of the Wharton School, examined what makes AI influencers' posts more (or less) effective. Analyzing roughly 10,000 Instagram posts from 28 AI influencers and running a series of controlled experiments, they found that posts showing the influencer interacting with a human—eating together, posing arm in arm, sharing a moment—drew about 21% more engagement than posts where the influencer appeared alone. "An AI influencer is, by definition, not human, and audiences know it," Cascio Rizzo explained.
"But when you show one genuinely interacting with a real person, people start to treat it as more human—and that changes everything." The reason comes down to a chain reaction in perception. Seeing an AI influencer share a real social moment with a person makes it seem more human—a quality psychologists call anthropomorphism. It's a dynamic storytellers have long explored.
In Spike Jonze's "Her," Joaquin Phoenix's character falls for an AI voice assistant through their intimate exchanges—it's the interaction, not the technology, that makes her feel real. The same instinct that draws moviegoers to fictional characters can make AI influencers seem more human—and, in turn, more trustworthy—when they appear to connect with real people. That perception of trust can make their content more persuasive—the kind that makes people pause, engage and remember.
But the effect hinges on one thing: the interaction has to be genuine and meaningful. A person simply standing in the background of a photo does nothing. Pairing an AI influencer with another AI character does nothing either.
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