“Don’t believe everything you see on the internet,” they say.
Miquela Sousa and her group of influencer friends have taken this phrase to a whole new level.
Photo courtesy of @lilmiquela on IG.
The Instagram model and pop star has been on the rise within the last two years. Sousa, better known as “Lil Miquela,” has 1.7 million followers on Instagram. She posts photos at movie premieres, makes vlogs, has a skincare routine and has starred in countless advertisements and brand deals next to famous actors and high-fashion models. Sousa is the quintessential teenage influencer… except she is computer-generated.
Photo courtesy of @lilmiquela on IG.
Miquela Sousa is a virtual influencer. If it weren’t for her video-game-character looks, you would never be able to tell. Her human-like stats don’t miss a beat, down to her ethnicity. Sousa is 19-years-old and Brazilian-American, according to The Cut. When Sousa first blew up, she only appeared in photographs. No one knew what she was or what she was capable of, but she has truly come to life since then. Now, Sousa makes music videos and vlogs. She has a real voice.
On the 13th, the music video for her single “Automatic” dropped. The house-party video begins with Sousa in front of a vanity, admiring her digitized self in the mirror. It soon breaks into a lot of dancing and excitement with actual people. The logistics of how Sousa sings, dances and takes selfies with real humans is still a mystery, but the public is fervently trying to put the pieces together.
GIF courtesy of Giphy.
What fans do know is that Sousa was created by Brud, a startup based out of Los Angeles, which in a mysterious public Google document with eight anonymous administrators, claims to be “a transmedia studio that creates digital character-driven story worlds.”
Brud has created many virtual influencers. Bermudaisbae, who for a long time was far less popular than Sousa, has gained traction recently after an “update” that turned her from a basic-blonde-blogger type to a robotic Paris Hilton doppelganger. Bermuda creates music as well. “Stream my Red Hot Chili Peppers cover [BELOW] or I’ll rob your dad!!” she writes in her Instagram bio.
Photo courtesy of @bermudaisbae on IG.
Sousa, Bermuda and Blawko — another Brud influencer — photographed together:
Photo courtesy of @bermudaisbae on IG.
Many scandals have broken out within Brud’s world of digital influencers, making the public more involved and enticed by their social media presence. This brings up interesting questions; what exactly are Brud’s intentions? Is the company simply using new and exciting technology to test how far they can push the “influencer” persona or is it something deeper? The internet has its theories. “…it used to be that real-looking fake humans were confined to Disney parks, movies, music videos, or video games,” Emilia Petrarca of The Cut said, “Now they occupy spaces once reserved for real-life people experiencing real-life things.”
Whoever Lil Miquela, Bermudaisbae or Brud really is, the internet will continue to be amazed by these digitized celebrities. The conversation will continue and we will keep asking whether or not robots are as real as they say they are.
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Edited by Katie Carnefix