Over the last week, I grew a 100% AI influencer to 500 followers (and a viral video) …and it took <10 minutes / day, and only three tools! This may be the future of brands, marketing, and even entertainment. How I did it + what I learned 👇
First - the best way to “bootstrap” a new account is on the back of a trend with a lot of search volume. I chose the University of Alabama’s sorority rush week - hundreds of girls post OOTD (outfit of the day) videos. I used those hashtags for early traction (first video ⬇️)
The primary tool I used was Veo 3. There are tradeoffs here - it’s incredibly easy to generate, but the voice and face quality do have a bit of an “AI feel.” Luckily, my audience was largely unaware (at least for the first few videos!)
Veo 3 is expensive, so I used ChatGPT to help me generate prompts - especially for the script. On Veo 3, you can tell the “character” exactly what to say… ChatGPT can help you nail something that sounds realistic based on the age, gender, etc of your influencer.
What about consistency across videos? (Or even in videos longer than eight seconds) Once I got a good Veo gen, I used Flux Kontext on @krea_ai to generate the same character in a new outfit or setting. Then, I uploaded it to Veo Frames -> Video as the starting image.
The hardest part? Voice consistency! Veo generates the voice with no input allowed (beyond the prompt), so I had to carefully prompt the voice every time…and it still wasn’t great. Looking forward to @elevenlabsio integrations here 👀
The most surprising thing about this whole experiment was the viewer reaction. I got brand deal offers, and incredibly sincere and kind DMs when I posted a “crying video” …and even the people who figured out I was AI were still along for the ride to follow the storyline!
My most viral video (100k views) also looked the “most AI” - at least in my opinion. Which leads me to my biggest takeaway…if it’s entertaining enough, does it matter if it’s real? 🤔
And shoutout to my team for listening to me yap about this for the last week 😂 especially @illscience @joeschmidtiv @astrange @venturetwins
