It’s easier than ever to become a celebrity nowadays (as clichéd as that is to point out). You don’t even need to exist. Amid a new profusion of virtual influencers, CGI it-girls, holographic pop stars, and AI personalities, we’re seeing a brand new wave of digital stardom coalescing before our eyes.
Still, despite being fake, some are arguably more “real” than many human celebrities out there. Here are 10 up-and-coming cy-lebs to watch.
10. Shudu
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Although Lil Miquela doesn’t look half as real as Shudu, she’s established a cult following of her own—more than a million fans spanning Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, and collectively known as “Miquelites.”
Bizarrely, even long after her debut online, many continued to wonder whether Lil Miquela was actually human. Some claimed that her lack of visible pores was proof she was definitely fake, while others argued she’d just been heavily photoshopped but was in fact real underneath. She herself tended to evade the question entirely by highlighting the extent to which we all, in one way or another, use technology to shape how we’re perceived.
Her full name is Miquela Sousa and she presents herself as a 19-year-old Brazilian/Spanish LA it-girl routinely depicted outside clubs, at parties, and with friends while modeling clothes. She has also released her own music on Spotify and, as a remote-controlled drone, attended Prada’s 2018 autumn/winter fashion show in Milan.
Like many celebrities, she’s even been involved in a publicity-boosting online feud, in this case with fellow CGI “Instagram Girl” Bermuda. After some tedious back-and-forth, Bermuda allegedly hacked Lil Miquela’s Instagram account and threatened to out her as a fake—unless she did it herself within 48 hours. So Lil Miquela did, releasing an emotional statement in April 2018 to confirm that she is (unsurprisingly) “not a human being.” It then emerged that she, her “brother” Blawko, and her bitchy Republican rival Bermuda were all created by the same company—Brud—to serve as “virtual influencers” or cash cows.
Actually, her “coming out” as “not a human being” may well have been legally motivated. In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission updated its guidelines on product endorsement to force online “influencers” (bloggers and other personalities) to make it clear which of their posts are sponsored. Not only did Lil Miquela fail to declare who was paying, but, prior to her announcement, it wasn’t even clear who got paid.
7. Aimi Eguchi
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LaTurbo Avedon isn’t so much a fake celebrity as a digital avatar for a real-life artist. But like so many others on this list, she’s one that questions and explores time-honored notions of authorship and identity, and in particular how we use social media. Like most people, she says, her digital persona emerges through the process of sharing pics and chatting online—the only difference being that she exists nowhere else.
She’s a native inhabitant of digital space, inspired by Second Life and rendered using 3D modeling software. She makes and exhibits her art in digital space too, showcasing her virtual sculptures and environments almost exclusively online. She also curates a digital exhibition space for other artists to show off their work.
Although Avedon has exhibited at physical galleries as well, the nature of her art generally requires people to meet her halfway. At Somerset House in London, for example, this meant strapping on a virtual reality headset. And when she’s interviewed by reporters, Avedon communicates solely by email, text message, Facebook, and so on—only ever meeting “face-to-face” in virtual worlds like Second Life.
We still don’t know who she “really” is, who lives and breathes behind the persona, but that’s actually beside the point. LaTurbo Avedon and her work are the persona and she’s nothing whatsoever without it.
5. Max Headroom
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People didn’t know quite what to make of Max Headroom back in the 1980s. Billed as the world’s first computer-generated TV host (but portrayed by a man in make-up), he was unlike anything they’d seen before. And he was rapidly becoming an unprecedented global phenomenon. By the end of the 1980s, he was deemed more culturally influential than Michael Jackson himself.
The character was originally created to anchor (or rather veejay) a music video show for Britain’s burgeoning Channel 4, ultimately hoping to capitalize on the game-changing success of America’s MTV. Before long, though, the idea had evolved into a TV movie as well (Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future) and was later picked up by US TV networks ABC and HBO for various series of their own. Max Headroom was also the face of Coca-Cola’s “Catch the Wave” ad campaign, directed by Ridley Scott.
In 1987 (the year in which he got his own talk show on Cinemax), Max Headroom’s celebrity status became official when he was featured on the cover of Newsweek alongside the headline “Mad About Max: The Making of a Video Cult.”
Unfortunately, this was also around the time that his original creators were losing creative control, unable to pay mounting lawyers’ fees amid aggressive backdoor negotiations and the involvement of corporate interests—all of which, ironically, Max Headroom was intended to parody. And in these less than visionary hands, life came to imitate art completely. When Max Headroom’s ratings began to flag (unable to compete against Miami Vice and Dallas), executives pulled the plug.
But he was destined to live on in the zeitgeist. One month after his cancellation in October 1987, a group of proto-hackers known as “phreakers” briefly commandeered two Chicago-area TV stations to play footage of a man dressed as Max Headroom. Then in Back to the Future Part II (1989), we got the Max Headroom-inspired talking heads of Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan. More recently, Eminem’s “Rap God” music video also paid homage to the character, as have some videos put out by Anonymous.
In 2007, Channel 4 actually revived the character as a crotchety old man—played by the original actor Matt Frewer—to announce their switchover to digital broadcasts. Now more relevant than ever, there have even been talks to write a brand new series for Max Headroom. First, though, they’ll need to figure out who owns which parts of this completely manufactured celebrity.
4. Sophia
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To understand the appeal of Hatsune Miku, an obviously fictional cartoon popstar, we need to have a think about moe. Moe refers to feelings of affection and even devotion toward characters in anime and manga, especially young, “cute” or “huggable” characters that embody an innocent outlook. Obviously, each of these traits carries with it the implication of virginity, which is another characteristic of moe but almost always without reference to sex.
Hatsune Miku, with her big blue eyes, childlike body, and schoolgirl outfit, comes straight from the moe mold. She evokes feelings of fondness and devotion from her sizeable global fan base and has come to seem almost relatable, which is interesting considering she basically started out as a logo.
Specifically, she was designed as a “moe anthropomorphism” or corporate mascot for Crypton Future Media’s Vocaloid-based vocal synthesizer software, which allows users to digitally create and record songs with Miku as the vocalist.
She wasn’t the first of her kind (Crypton already had two others—Meiko and Kaito—on the go and has since come out with more) but she was the first to get moe just right. Before long, additional apps allowed users to choreograph and animate her in music videos as well, turning Miku into a collaborative global phenomenon.
According to her product webpage, she now has over 900,000 fans on Facebook and, because they make most of “her” music, more than 100,000 songs to her name (which, incidentally, is Japanese for “the first Sound from the Future”). As a 3D hologram projected onto a screen, she has also “performed” sold-out concerts around the world, opened for Lady Gaga’s ArtRave tour, and appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman as the featured musical act. She has even modeled clothes made especially for her by Marc Jacobs and Givenchy, and was photographed for American Vogue.
Although 3D hologram concerts are nothing new, as a popstar Miku is unique. She is created by, and therefore entirely dependent upon, her fans (or “prosumers,” i.e. producing consumers) for her existence—a lot like an idol or god. And that makes her strangely mercurial, ascribed differing meanings by different creators depending on their personal tastes. She is, in other words, the first decentralized, democratized popstar, and that’s exactly how Crypton CEO Hiroyuki Itoh wants her to stay.
2. Maya Kodes
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While it may not be entirely appropriate to think of Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, as a “celebrity,” she and her ilk are certainly household names—and not just because they live in your household. You might even call them trendsetters; in 2015, “Alexa,” the name of Amazon’s Siri-type helper, became the 32nd most popular baby name in America, up from #63 the year before.
According to some parents of autistic children, Siri can also serve as a role model of sorts. For instance, whereas humans might lose patience with (or get offended by) someone who doesn’t pick up on social cues, Siri patiently and politely responds every time, in turn teaching autistic children the value of conversational skills. Furthermore, SRI, the company that created Siri for Apple, envisions a future where AI might also help encourage eye contact by tracking users’ eye movements during conversation.
Despite these disembodied AIs being mass-produced machines, they’re arguably more personable than your average celebrity. Not only do they live in your pocket at your constant beck and call, but some of us actually see them as human—or something comparable at least. A recent survey by LivePerson, for example, found that of only 4% of people who could name a “famous female leader in tech,” a quarter said Alexa or Siri—essentially equating them with Bill Gates or Elon Musk. And Alex Jones famously accused Alexa of “lying” to him about the CIA on his InfoWars conspiracy news program.
Others find themselves extending basic courtesies like “please” and “thank you” to these faceless AI assistants, and look forward to a time when more extended, more meaningful interactions become possible. Then again, given how quickly we turned Microsoft’s TayTweets AI chatbot into a white supremacist ideologue spouting off about Trump’s wall and gassing the Jews after just a few hours on Twitter, perhaps we’re simply anxious to show Siri and co. humanity’s better side in case they ever start reflecting it back.
Source: Top Tenz