Woman of influence and PhD student

Jul Jeonghyun Parke tracks social media’s virtual influencers for her PhD thesis. Not only does she check in regularly on the ubiquitous online activities of figures like Shudu, Rozy and Lil Miquela, she also keeps tabs on what their creators are up to.

Her research documents both how these non-human influencers have come to wield such tremendous cultural political and economic power and “why the creators of these virtual humans engage in the pattern of digitally creating young women of colour, especially when many of these creators are male and often of different racial identities.”

An excellent three-minute summary of Parke’s research can be found in a video she produced for the Storytellers Challenge, an annual competition put on by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC). The contest asks students to inspire audiences with a compelling story – told in up to 300 words or three minutes – that shows how SSHRC-funded research is making a difference in the lives of Canadians. Parke was one of five 2024 winners.

Parke’s interest in virtual influencers stems in part from her cultural background. Growing up in Canada in a South Korean family, she was aware of computer-generated celebrities like Adam, a Korean CGI singer who debuted in the 1990s. “In Korea, the early embrace of e-sports, gaming culture, and 3D imagery made it easier to launch these characters into mainstream settings,” she says.

After reading Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures by Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin, published in 2020, Parke was prompted to explore further. She was surprised to find that virtual influencers are a global phenomenon. According to her estimates, there are more than 200 of them on Instagram, not just in the west but also in Brazil, China, Japan and South Korea.

The allure of these figures frequently stems from the mystery that surrounds them. “If you look at the comments on their posts, people often ask, ‘Are you real?’ There’s a curiosity and sensationalism about whether they are human or not, which contributes to their success on the platform,” says Parke. “In every case, the creators kept it a secret for about a year. They wanted to bank on the ambiguity of whether the influencers were real or not.”

Some 80% of successful virtual influencers on Instagram are female-identified, which is partly driven by the dominance of beauty and fashion in adjacent advertising industries, says Parke. For the influencers’ creators, there’s value in connecting the machine, the technological, and the Cyborg with ethnic minority status,” she says. “They’re basically utilizing racial traits as a way to stand out in a competitive social media economy.”

One of the most prominent examples is Shudu, a Black digital supermodel created by Cameron-James Wilson, a white British photographer. Wilson has said in interviews that he was inspired by dark-skinned models and wanted to reflect that in Shudu, who is a composite of several Black female figures, including the supermodel Iman and the Princess of South Africa Barbie doll.

While Shudu has been praised for representing diversity, her creation also raises questions about commodification, says Parke. “It’s a highly commodified form of labour where the influencers, though not real, are designed to be flawless versions of humans.”

In addition to Shudu, Parke has studied other notable virtual influencers, gathering data from published interviews and creator testimonies. She closely follows Rozy, a South Korean virtual influencer created by Locus-X, and Lil Miquela, a Brazilian American created by Los Angelesbased Brud Inc. “While I approach the topic critically as an academic, I do find the content fascinating and sometimes distracting,” she says. “I have an affinity for some of these characters.”

Which is not to say that she thinks the influencers should be completely free to do as they please. Parke’s work also examines regulations for social media and AI. She notes that Meta, the company behind Facebook, recently launched a feature that adds a ‘Made with AI’ tag to AI-generated images. “It would be low hanging fruit,” says Parke, “to require [all] platforms to explicitly tell people who see content that this was computer or AI generated.”

Looking to the future, Parke believes the popularity of virtual influencers reflects broader cultural trends. “Nothing is permanent in the digital economy, and we’ve seen some virtual influencers lose followers,” she says. “It may lead to adjacent industries, like personal AI avatars, or to new ways of embodying virtual human identity.”