Q&A with NYT’s Tiffany Hsu: AI-generated influencers are everywhere — and we’re tired

The conversation

On The Atlantic’s Galaxy Brain podcast, Charlie Warzel interviewed New York Times technology reporter Tiffany Hsu about the sudden bloom of AI-generated influencers — glossy, photo‑real avatars hawking supplements and lifestyle brands. Hsu traced the trend to a perfect storm: advances in generative audio and video, an attention economy that rewards endless volume, and industries like wellness that have historically been fertile ground for dubious marketing. It has been reported that venture firm Andreessen Horowitz invested in Doublespeed, a company that markets “bulk content creation” with a banner that reads “never pay a human again.”

The emotional core: exhaustion

The key point wasn’t just fakery but fatigue. Hsu argues that the sheer quantity of synthetic content is producing a new kind of epistemic exhaustion — a weariness so deep that many people have simply stopped caring whether what they see is real. Sound dramatic? Maybe. But consider the reported finding from SEO firm Graphite: beginning around November 2024, AI‑generated articles on the web overtook human‑written ones. When truth becomes optional and emotion is the only currency, audiences move on or harden. What’s left of authenticity then?

Trust, deception, and the marketplace

Some AI avatars are easy to spot. Some are not. It has been reported that certain synthetic influencers are good enough to dupe users and drive real sales. That raises immediate questions for platforms, advertisers, and regulators: do you force labels, police creators, or accept a new normal where feelings matter more than facts? Brands chasing “one video a hundred ways” are playing a dangerous game — they might win short attention bursts, but they risk corroding trust long term.

What to watch

Expect more tools that scale synthetic content, more experiments from advertisers, and more debate about disclosure and liability. And brace yourself: if the feed keeps multiplying, the righteous outrage cycle may be replaced by resigned shrugs. That’s the uncomfortable, human moment in this story — not a tech problem alone, but a social one. Welcome to the attention economy’s next trick: infinitely believable fakes, and the slow erosion of why we cared in the first place.

Sources: theatlantic.com