The Power of Illusion

WHEN YOU VISIT the Instagram account of Kyra, the 20-something social media influencer whose home is marked as Mumbai, you will notice that hers is not unlike the accounts of the many influencers who put a manufactured slice of their lives on social media. There are coffee pictures and the occasional trip to a Starbucks; there are pictures of vacations, beaches, old havelis, and music concerts; posts on yoga sessions with captions that feel like they have been ripped from the internet; enthusiastic responses and emojis to anodyne comments; AMAs (ask me anything), Instagram stories and the infrequent reels.

But what sets her apart is that Kyra, whose posts have ratcheted up nearly 1.50 lakh followers on the platform in just a few months, isn’t real. Everything about her, from her appearance to her interests, even her responses to others’ comments, is invented and designed to attract the maximum followers and likes. She doesn’t live in Mumbai but is run by a team of computer engineers and animators, social media marketing professionals, and a fashion stylist.

Kyra is entirely computer-generated. Introduced earlier this year by a social media marketing firm, she belongs to a growing cadre of marketers across the globe known as virtual influencers.

“We are already in that space where Kyra can fool a lot of people about whether she is real or not,” says Himanshu Goel, the business head of Top Social India, who is also running the Kyra project. “But very soon, no one will be able to tell whether she is real or a CGI (computer-generated imagery) production.”

Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing industry globally. The global influencer market was estimated to be worth $13.8 billion last year. The India market, estimated to be worth `900 crore (about $112.6 million) at the end of last year, according to a 2021 report released by GroupM’s influencer marketing division INCA, will reach around `2,200 crore (about $275 million) by 2025.

Most businesses are increasingly using social media celebrities and influencers to catch the eyes of the young who spend most of their time online. The emergence of virtual characters like Kyra poses a question that will only become louder—why get a celebrity or influencer to promote your brand when you can design the perfect ambassador from scratch?

Will technology that took away the jobs of workers in factories and other fields, take away the jobs of those employed to look attractive and lead glamorous lives in the near future?

The concept isn’t entirely an original one. There have been several human simulations before, from fictional characters and musicians who showed up on Japanese anime TV shows and films, to virtual bands like the Grammy award-winning Gorillaz, whose real creators continue to have their animated characters appear in music videos, interviews, comic strips and even collaborate with other musicians.

What is different is that virtual influencers now are much more realistic and engaging, and through social media platforms, present the artifice of a life worth following.

The most popular among them so far is a character known as Lil Miquela. Introduced in 2016 by Los Angeles firm Brud, and only revealed as a virtual character much later, she is described as a 19-year-old Brazilian-American model. With over 3 million followers on Instagram, she has released songs on Spotify, promoted brands like Chanel, Prada, and Samsung, done media interviews, and even has a clothing line of her own.

She also presents a life on social media that is almost real. She has a boyfriend (a human named Nick Killian, who often features in her posts, and who she broke up with some years ago only to patch up later) and political views of her own (but which—such as her support for #BlackLivesMatter, abortion rights, and LGBTQ+ causes or the time she kissed the supermodel Bella Hadid for a Calvin Klein commercial—have made many uneasy as well). Several more popular virtual influencers have since emerged, from Shudu, a Black character described as the “world’s first digital supermodel”, and whose creation and depiction by a white male (a fashion photographer named Cameron-James Wilson) has attracted criticism, to Rozy in South Korea and Imma in Japan.

The phenomenon gathering steam abroad and the marketing potential it carried made the Indian social media marketing agency Top Social India start work on its own virtual influencer last year. Top Social India’s Goel believes that virtual characters will become a crucial aspect of influencer marketing and storytelling in the near future. “There’s a study by Gartner which predicts that 30 per cent of all influencer marketing budgets will be allocated to virtual influencers by 2025. According to me, this could even be by 2023. Virtual influencers and CGI are going to be huge,” he says. “We’ve already seen that with movies and TV shows. We will see more of that in social media and ads now, as the technology becomes more and more acceptable,” he says.

Kyra’s character and her posts have been tailored to go viral. She is an amalgam, in her appearance and personality traits, Goel reveals, of the most popular influencers and models we see on social media today. Her interests, such as fashion, were chosen because it tends to be the most popular category in influencer marketing. According to him, while they took some time to find the correct production agency that could pull off creating a realistic virtual character, her story will prove to be the most essential aspect of the character’s success, going ahead. “We have an entire character Bible written down for her— everything from the kind of personality she has, her moods, what she is like when she is happy or angry,” he says. “Once we had zeroed in on her character, we had to develop her like a movie character.”

GOEL IS REFERRING to the elaborate storyline prepared for her. According to this plot, Kyra is a character from the metaverse, the term for the immersive form of the internet that many anticipate the web will transform into, who has lost her memory and is now rediscovering herself one Instagram post at a time.

Her story arc will unfold, her creators plan, over the next two to three years, and over time, the character will begin uploading other forms of content on various platforms, such as long video content on YouTube or songs attributed to her on audio platforms like Gaana and Spotify. “We would want to expand beyond social media, too, and get her on other platforms like TV and radio,” Goel says.

A virtual character like Kyra, her creators believe, will be immensely attractive to brands looking to get word on them and their products out. They claim she is seeing engagement rates nearly six times more than the average human social media influencer. “We have been in the social media marketing space for some time. So, we know what tools to follow to make an influencer as engaging as possible. And it is possible some of the high engagement rates we have seen is because she is something so novel,” Goel says. “One of her posts got around 12,000 likes, which comes to about a 12 per cent engagement rate. Most human influencers have an engagement rate of only 2 or 3 per cent.” The character crossed a milestone recently when the audio company boAT became the first Indian company to use Kyra for its brand promotion.

Kyra isn’t the only virtual character on Indian social media. Inega, a model talent agency that also dabbles in post-production work for ad films, began working on a virtual model back in 2020. But dissatisfaction with the final look of the character and the arrival of the pandemic meant that the project had to be temporarily shelved. It was revived with a new team of computer designers earlier this year, and the character, an Indian model named Nila, is expected to be relaunched by next month.

Unlike Kyra, who is made entirely of CGI, Nila takes another route. “We have taken a hybrid approach,” says Rahul Pai, the head of Inega Prograde, the firm’s post-production vertical, who is also handling the project to develop Nila. “What we have done is made [facial] composites and rendered Nila’s face out, which we then put on an actual model.” Using models whose body type closely matches what they have in mind for Nila, Inega is currently using photo-editing software to achieve this. But when they begin creating videos, they will use what is known as deepfake technology to develop their virtual character.

“We have taken this hybrid approach because we are aiming for a hyper-realistic character. Some virtual characters developed with full CGI don’t have a real-world feel. But Nila lives in Mumbai, not a fantasy world. She likes to go out and meet people, see places,” he explains, while pointing out how a few weeks ago, a model from a group shortlisted to represent Nila travelled to various parts of Mumbai with a photographer, to have candid photoshoots taken for Nila’s Instagram account.

While Inega is developing Nila as a virtual model first—one who, with her face edited onto a human with a similar body frame, will do campaign launches, model for the latest designs, and even walk the ramp—it will also work towards developing her as an influencer. “We want her to be more realistic. We want her to share things online, laugh and interact, and have thoughts on what she likes or doesn’t like. She will have a favourite brand, a favourite designer, even a favourite food which she will never taste,” he says, with a laugh.

THERE ARE SEVERAL reasons why these characters can become ideal vehicles for brand endorsements. None of them will age, develop acne or have a bad hair day. There will be no 10-year-old tweets that will resurface to haunt them. Shoots can be done or edited just as easily. “Just imagine you have to do a shoot in Paris. Instead of flying a model or influencer there, and doing several takes for the perfect shot, you can have someone like Kyra do it digitally,” Goel says. Also, the concerns faced by human influencers like dealing with the abuse and harassment of online trolls, Goel points out, do not apply here.

There are some concerns though. Many of the virtual influencers elsewhere, overwhelmingly female, have been accused of advancing stereotypes and unrealistic beauty standards. Shudu, for instance, who was modelled, according to her creator, on Barbie’s Princess of South Africa doll, was dubbed “a white man’s digital projection of real-life black womanhood” by The New Yorker. Made of pixels and designed on a computer, these “physically perfect” women on our mobile phones advance an idea of beauty, many suggest, that is literally impossible to attain.

These questions are currently far from the minds of the creators of Kyra and Nila. Engrossed in making their virtual characters successful, what is going to be essential, the two say, is the presentation of a life that is indistinguishable from the real. Over time, Kyra’s creators hope to introduce more virtual characters or influencers within her life, such as a pet dog, that will further deepen the illusion of reality. “The idea is that she appears as human as possible. It has to create an illusion, a suspension of disbelief,” Goel says.

Every few days, there are posts on Kyra’s Instagram stories where she appears to be at a real location, shooting videos or photos from her perspective like any other human. Sometimes, it is a video of a musician at a concert, and sometimes, pictures like that of a Starbucks coffee mug with the name Kyra scribbled on it. “Some of these are real pictures, where we have someone going around posing as Kyra. And some of them are entirely CGI,” Goel says. “We want to create a little mystery, not telling which is which.”

So far, social media may have been the venue where real humans acted fake. Now, we have fake ones playing real.

Digital lifeidentity crisisIndian societyKyrasocial mediaVirtual influencer