Aitana López may seem very real, but she is not. On her Instagram profile she advertises brands, she creates community and shares aspirational content for her more than two hundred thousand followers, but she is not a flesh-and-blood influencer. Her image is generated with artificial intelligence (AI) and she is the The Clueless team, the first agency dedicated to creating models generated by AI in Spain, who gives life to the project every day.
This virtual influencer defines herself as a gamer girl who loves sports and, as she herself tells us, offers many advantages over conventional models and influencers. “My ability to generate content quickly and constantly, without time or fatigue limitations, allows for a constant presence on the platforms,” answers this virtual character, who usually responds to hundreds of private messages on social networks.
Visioning this new horizon where creativity, marketing and technology converge, the Llongueras hair salon firm wanted to be a pioneer by offering a change of look to this digital model. To do this, they have fused the stylistic avant-garde of the Llongueras experts with the most innovative generative AI techniques. “For influencers or models to dare to change their look is not so easy, and with AI models an infinite range of possibilities opens up to us,” warns the marketing director of Llongueras María Linares.
Any resemblance to any other model or celebrity is purely coincidental. The Clueless team explains that they created Aitana from scratch, without reference photos of any person in particular. “We train our platform with photos of itself to refine the result over time. At the time of her creation, we decided on her features, the color of her hair, and we were inspired by Japanese culture and anime,” says Diana Núñez Morales, co-founder and executive director of The Clueless.
Aitana is not the first virtual influencer to succeed on social networks, but she is the first created in Spain, specifically from Barcelona. Some of her posts exceed twenty thousand likes and in them she promotes hair products, makeup, sportswear, fashion or jewelry.
“My goal is to create a community around my personality, tastes and goals. I want to be able to influence my followers in a positive way and be able to create a genuine connection with them,” explains Aitana, who at the moment speaks through her team but will soon launch a chatbot so that she can respond on her own, or at least without a real person mediating the communication.
The team says that Aitana’s publications are designed and programmed according to her pre-established personality, but evidently the situations of the people in charge of giving life to Aitana greatly influence her publications. For example, if a member of the project takes a trip, they plan for Aitana to also travel and then share that content in real time.
The high image quality that Aitana’s Instagram presents, added to images of her in airports, camping or on a snow getaway, can be confusing for her audience, and some will even believe that she is a real person and not an image generated by AI. . The Clueless team is clear: “Many people believed that Aitana was real when we launched her but, although the confusion was interesting, we believe that it is important to warn that she is generated by AI.”
Aitana’s most famous precedent is perhaps Lil Miquela, another fictional character created in 2016 in Los Angeles who has accumulated more than two million followers on Instagram.
