1337 (Leet) Evolution: AI-Driven Influencers Co-Created with User Input

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0:37This whole space, I think, has seen a really unprecedented growth with the digital human economy projected to go from about, I think by 2035, it's supposed to hit$125 billion. That's according to Gartner's estimations. And a lot of companies right now are trying to capitalize on this trend. So, of course, then we have the whole world of AI image generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which have simplified the creation of these kind of virtual influencers. I've seen so many of these accounts on Instagram and Twitter lately. 1337, which is a startup named after a term which was popular in the 80s gaming and hacker culture, has stepped into the scene.

1:19It just has received almost$4 million. dollars. It just came out of stealth. And 1337 essentially is kind of pioneering the realm of AI driven micro influencers. So these essentially are niche content creators with hyper focus interests, including, you know, gardening or emo music or vintage fashion. And, you know, you could have an influencer for classical literature, right? So they're just like really specialized kind of areas. So while AI is definitely at the forefront of these creations, the company also encourages users to have a say in shaping these influencers, which is kind of an interesting concept.

1:54So Jenny Deering, who's the co-founder and CEO of 1337 recently said, quote, in a world oversaturated with influencers who are often either too commercial or too impersonal, 1337 introduces diverse AI driven entities that engage users in entirely new dynamic ways. So these AI personalities, which are called entities, that's just what 1337 calls them come with some really intricate backstories and detailed personas. An example is Daria, who's like a music blogger they've created with, she has like kind of a strong inclination towards emo culture. And then she's got like some, you know, unique backgrounds.

2:33I think these entities are not limited to just Instagram. They have LinkedIn profiles, public Spotify playlists, and the capacity, the capability to essentially interact with their followers. Now, this is why this is important it's so interesting that like last year's problem or last month's problem all of a sudden it's like is it a feature or a bug so of course for the last year we've been hearing a lot of different platforms but i think twitter is the most vocal about it because elon musk talking about the bots on the platform and i think a lot of people have you know struggled with bots on the platform which is just fake accounts fake entities fake people um during the last election cycle this was something that was brought up a lot i think um essentially there was just like fake accounts, fake influencers, and then they would, you know, have a right, right wing ideologies or left wing ideologies.

3:22And they would kind of try to convince people to vote one way or another, they'd share news that that agreed with that. And they were they're like fake people. And I think the reason why these fake kind of influencer accounts are popular is because if you're trying to sway public opinion, this is my opinion on this all. But if you're trying to sway public opinion, and you're just one influencer, you only get so much reach. But if you make 20, 30, 100, 2000 of these accounts, some of them naturally are going to gain traction, your reach is going to be way bigger, and you can pretty much infinitely scale your impact, your reach, they can go comment with things like chat GPT.

3:57Now, you could hook chat GPT up to one of these, which I think essentially they do, like tie them into Twitter and have a go find all the content that's out there, whether it's like for your ideology or against your ideology, whether that's, you know, government or it's like in a specific industry, maybe you're like a concrete manufacturer and you want a specific type of concrete to be more popular. You can think of like Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison's, you know, the fight of like alternating current and direct current. They had all these like big publicity stunts they did back in the day where they would like, you know, electrocute an elephant to death to prove that one of these electricities forms electrical, you know, systems was unsafe.

4:37Well, that's what you did back in the day. You You electrocute an elephant to death and put it on the front of the New York Times. And that's how you proved that you are the superior electrical method. Today, a concrete company or an electrical company or someone else, they could just make a bunch of fake influencers go on Twitter and anyone else people are talking about like a specific topic that relates to their industry and have ChatGPT automatically put comments that, you know, strengthen their side, their narrative, whatever. So essentially it's like public perception, public, you know, you're trying to sway what the public believes in.

5:10And so this has been a big problem for a long time. Like this is we call this bot armies or troll armies if it's saying something you don't like. Right. But all of a sudden now there's companies that are making these quote unquote entities. And it's, you know, we're talking about how this is awesome. People are going to follow them like it's a good thing. So I don't know. To me, that's what I think is funny. um what's interesting here is it talks about like they have linkedin profiles that feels like weird to me because linkedin is you know typically supposed to be a place like okay i've definitely gotten a lot of linkedin spam from like fake accounts that are pretending to be a person then trying to like sell me stuff in my messages that's just annoying um but like they're saying this is a good thing right and it's kind of something i'd expect more with like a platform like instagram there's tons of fake accounts or just like fan pages or random pages but linkedin is not supposed to be for that.

5:57LinkedIn is really supposed to be like actual humans, actual people with actual job descriptions. So that seems like weird to me. Public Spotify playlists. Why do they do this? Because you can, for those that don't know, I have a big background in Spotify. I have tons of content on Spotify I've produced and I have worked in the industry for a long time. I still make a decent amount of money month to month from content I have there. So I know this industry really well. The reason why they bring up the fact that they have public Spotify playlists is because essentially what you can do, it's actually a whole business where you can create a Spotify playlist, try to get like 50 ,000 people to follow your playlist.

6:33And it's all about like some sort of specific topic, you know, like punk music, rock music, you get 100 ,000 people to follow and listen to that playlist. And then you can get artists to pay you to drop your song into that playlist. Because essentially, if it's in the playlist, they know there's 100 ,000 people that listen to this every month, they're going to probably get 100 ,000 or more plays of people listening to this playlist so it's like they're obviously monetizing this in real ways um it just seems weird to me honestly a lot of this seems quite sketchy in any case um they're kind of emphasizing that their approach is going beyond just basic chatbot interactions with these like fake influencers they said quote we're crafting entities that evolve with the niche communities adapting to the rapidly changing digital landscape um they're gonna launch all of these in january i think so get ready for the bot army nation to take over the internet oh my gosh just think about like a hundred thousand ai influencers with their own like going on youtube videos commenting going on twitter commenting going on every social media platform commenting whatever they want trying to build their little audiences something about that is not uh not my vibe but in any case i think this is a really these they're definitely intriguing these ai personas are essentially a result of collaboration between 1337's founding team.

7:52They use GPT-4 for all the written content. Midjourney is what they use for all the art. So like pictures of the influencer is going to be generated on Midjourney. And then they have some of their own in-house solutions. Robin Raska, who's a co-founder, kind of talked about the whole process and mentioned that their focus is on maintaining consistent facial features for their virtual entities. Yeah, no doubt. This is exactly what you do making a fake influencer you want them every picture to look the same it's actually one of the biggest struggles so I'll give it to them that that's not actually easy mid-journey is essentially like mid-journey is made in a way and I know this too because I've talked with and a lot of people that have done like illustrated books for example illustrated kids books and one of the biggest problems is when you use mid-journey to create all of the graphics or illustrations for a kids book the hardest part is like from page to page making it have the same kid because you can give it a prompt it's like you know young kid playing with airplane um in forest with the sun in the sky kid is happy with black hair brown eyes uh four years old girl like you could say that but when you but it will generate two completely looking four-year-old girls um in this in the situation but depending on like you know okay now the girl is like going on the playground or whatever right and so uh mid-journey just generates a different person it's really hard to get it to be the exact same person so this is i think one of the things that uh they're focusing on now there are a handful of tricks and things you can do um if you if you get it to generate an image in certain styles um then it has kind of like a smaller scope i think this is my thesis on why this works is it has a smaller scope of content that feeds into the ai model right so for example um if you ask it for a very specific type the style the the ai the you know gpt4 or or sorry dolly 3 or mid journey was only trained on like a handful of images in that style and all of those images had like the same character in them so sometimes that makes it easier if you find like a unique style to get the same person in any case this is the problem that um they're they're fighting with here and i've seen this issue on some of these bot accounts where it's like a bunch of it's like an influencer account but it's like ai and it's like yeah it's like a very similar dude with brown hair and a chiseled chin but it's like not the exact same guy so this is what they're fighting with here um for users looking to kind of co-create with an with uh an entity 1337 offers kind of an interactive platform that's through this so through their discord chat you can prompt a caption and a series of photos um and you essentially kind of create these entities that they have plans to roll out revenue sharing models for super creators.

10:35And they're also teasing an upcoming feature. I think they have some like enabling these entities to produce podcasts and videos. And this is set to launch in the first half of 2024. So I've done this as well. I've created a ton of AI created podcasts. Last summer, I just did a project and created probably 10 to 20 different AI podcasts. And some of them were really successful. Multiple of them had over 100 ,000 listens on them. My strategy with that was that I kind of used that to grow an audience, then I would get a real person to take over the podcast. I just gave my friends a bunch of podcasts, to be honest, and had them kind of take them over.

11:10This podcast that I'm running now, I used sort of a similar strategy to this. When I first launched it, I actually created three AI recorded podcasts. So ChatGPT just wrote them, and then I had like an AI voice read it and I posted them on the podcast and I was just testing to see if like this the topic of AI and Chad GPT would get traction I posted those episodes and then like a week later the episodes organically got a bunch of listens and they didn't have a very good watch rate or like listen rate people didn't listen to the whole episodes because it's an AI voice and it wasn't that good but it showed me and it validated the idea that there was a lot of people interested in the topics I had like I don't know maybe like a thousand people watch those in a week or something.

11:51So I was like, okay, this is a popular area, deleted the AI ones, just took it over with myself talking about all this kind of content and everything happening in AI. And it's been a phenomenally successful podcast over a million listens. But you know, I do see like, you know, I can't call the kettle too black because I've used all of these strategies that they're using. It's just, I usually use it as like a launch pad or a starting point. And they're literally trying to make like an AI human that can make podcasts and generate revenue you from them and uh i don't know i just think it gets i just worry this whole thing gets to a very spammy point where the whole internet's full of all these fake influencers and i don't want to sit there in a discord chatting with like 10 ai influencers that's just chat gbt i don't know it seems like a depressing world if nothing else we need to have disclaimers on all of these influencers um so we know kind of like hashtag ad on like whenever an info a real influencer is like featuring a product they need to have a hashtag ai so we know that this isn't a real person because right now it's like they have the problem with the faces and like you can just tell it's an ai image because it's not like super super realistic but like eventually these things will look perfect like a real human it's going to look exactly like a person every picture will be the same they'll have videos of them talking and moving and doing stuff so i think it just gets to a point where people would like to know if they're talking to a chat gpt or a real human um and yeah it's kind of funny i think it people call this really innovative i worry it's really spammy i mean sure they they say this is like cool but think of all like the bad actors that use this china is gonna love it russia is gonna love it north korea is gonna love it um crypto scammers are gonna love it like you could just there's so many so many ridiculous parts about this so i think this is definitely an interesting company to follow it's a very interesting area it has a lot of implications for ai i'll keep you updated on all of it but definitely an interesting story.