The digital economy spent years selling us the dream of the free, independent creator. At first glance, when we follow them, it really can look that way, but we are often seeing only one dimension of the story. A camera, an idea, a little talent, and enough persistence were supposed to be all an individual needed to build their own online presence. But reality is different. The so-called “content creator” is almost always working on someone else’s land. The platform determines their visibility, their rhythm, their punishments and rewards, their erasure — and that is only the beginning of a story that keeps escalating.
Because once we dig a little deeper, we find an almost inhumanly optimized machine — the perfect phrase for the AI age! — which, just as it has reached its peak, thanks to those willing to endure and survive it, is now considering removing the human from the equation entirely. In other words, it wants to turn that person’s potential into a double and retire the never-quite-reliable organic version.
Clearly, as always, everything revolves around money. But now it is moving into a realm of absurdity. Still, let us start at the beginning. Whom are you more likely to trust: a Google ad for a mechanic, or a friend who tells you, “I know a good one — reliable, and not too expensive”? The question is already rhetorical. Of course you will go with the friend’s recommendation.
But often you will also trust the recommendation of a “semi-friend”, which is essentially what your favorite content creator is. You know them. You follow them. They open up completely, tell stories from their private life, and you almost feel as if you are living through those experiences with them, through that parasocial relationship. In that process, a certain amount of trust is created.
You can only imagine how valuable that person becomes to promotion and marketing industries that know people dislike ads and trust them less and less. But this is also where the trap begins — a trap that will eventually consume everything: the creator, the trust, and finally you as well. And no one in that chain is necessarily to blame, at least no one visible. Things simply follow their inevitable course.
Because the revenue from ordinary advertising — say, the ads shown before a YouTube video begins, for those of you who still have not installed a decent ad blocker — remains humiliatingly low for most creators. A video that takes days of research, filming, and editing often brings in an amount that barely covers basic costs, or perhaps pays for one slightly better lunch. Or even a mediocre one.
The platform gives access to an audience, but it rarely gives anyone a stable life. In that arrangement, sponsorship becomes a temporary escape route that very quickly turns into the trap itself.
Formally, the creator works for themselves. Economically, they depend on brands, agencies, and the algorithm. They have to keep producing constantly so they do not disappear from recommendations. A pause means a drop in reach; a drop in reach means a weaker negotiating position; and a weaker position means a greater willingness to compromise. Those compromises can destroy them fairly quickly once they start promoting all kinds of scams. The system first creates scarcity, then offers advertising as salvation.
Trust as a commodity
Every successful creator eventually builds up a reserve of trust. Their audience follows them because they seem familiar, honest, knowledgeable, or at least human enough. As mentioned, that sense of closeness becomes their most valuable resource. Traditional advertising bought space. The influencer economy buys a relationship.
That is why a sponsored segment is never just a short ad. It is a small transaction of trust. When a creator recommends a mattress, an app, or a dietary supplement, they are not only selling a product. They are selling part of the bond they have spent years building with their audience. If the product is legitimate, the damage is limited. If it is a dubious scheme, a false health promise, or a gambling app, trust becomes a tool of manipulation — and it is spent in large quantities.
The most dangerous erosion happens gradually. First comes a harmless campaign, then increasingly murky brands, then habit. The creator learns to justify compromises. The audience learns to doubt every recommendation. The brand learns that someone’s credibility can be bought, used up, and then replaced with another face.
Agencies that measure how an audience breathes
Behind the illusion of spontaneity stands a vast apparatus. Brands often do not approach creators directly, but almost exclusively through agencies, intermediaries, and analytics platforms. There, creators are treated like an investment portfolio. Their views, comments, the tone of their audience, and their conversion rates all become data in a spreadsheet.
Follower count is no longer enough. Agencies want to know what kind of audience a creator has, how much that audience trusts them, how often it argues, how often it jokes, how cynical it is, and how quickly it reacts to a commercial message. The comments under a YouTube video become a mine. Whatever a viewer writes out of affection, boredom, or anger is turned into a signal for advertisers.
That is where the level of optimization becomes visible. The audience thinks it is taking part in a conversation, while in the background someone is calculating how much that conversation can be converted into sales. The tone of the comments, the frequency of reactions, the “emotional temperature of the community” — all of it feeds directly into the valuation of a creator. Once, comments were read in order to understand an audience. Today, they are read in order to calculate how much that audience is worth.
Intermediaries for the intermediaries
Behind warm business emails there is often a cold economy of mass outreach. A creator receives a message in which someone admires them, praises their work, and claims that a “collaboration would be perfect.” Very often, that message is sent by someone who has never watched their content. Even more often, it is sent by someone working for very little money who has to meet a daily quota — and, more recently, those agents are increasingly AI bots.
A large part of that work has been outsourced to virtual assistants, freelancers, and small teams in countries with cheaper labor. They collect email addresses, send hundreds of messages, track replies, and try to drive down the creator’s price. This creates a chain in which everyone performs intimacy for the person below them. The brand wants authenticity. The agency wants a margin. The subcontractor wants to meet the quota. The creator wants to survive. The audience wants to believe.
The entire system produces artificial intimacy at scale. Even creators are courted with fake empathy, artificially generated personas, and personalized messages written for thousands of addresses. When the industry speaks to creators this way, it is easy to imagine what it is willing to do to the viewer — that is, to the potential customer — who only wants to watch a video in peace, and what it is willing to push on them in order to get hold of their money.
UGC and advertising disguised as ordinary life
So-called “user-generated content,” or UGC, has become the new gold mine of digital advertising. Here we have people recording videos in kitchens, cars — increasingly often — or living rooms, talking about a product as if they have just discovered something useful. Everything looks casual, deliberately imperfect, and sincere. Deliberately, of course.
Traditional advertising aspired to polish, but the selling power of that polish has long since worn out, especially among younger generations that have become “immune” to it. UGC advertising, on the other hand, imitates everyday life. Poorer lighting, handheld framing, and the tone of a friendly tip create the impression of spontaneity. The viewer does not see a corporate message, but a person who looks like a neighbor, a colleague, or an acquaintance from the internet. Ordinariness becomes a costume of credibility.
Over time, that ordinariness turns into a full industrial format. Dozens of people in dozens of kitchens say almost the same sentences. Every video performs personal experience, while collectively they reveal a new production line. Authenticity becomes a style that can simply be ordered. Human experience is reduced to a shot, a tone, and a few rehearsed imperfections.
Comments, bots, and fake social proof
Advertising has long since stopped living only inside the video. It lives in the comments below it. Likes, replies, arguments, and enthusiastic reactions create an atmosphere in which the product appears more relevant. People trust crowd signals. If many people are commenting, if many are asking questions, if many are praising something, the product gains the appearance of importance.
Digital space can manufacture that appearance very cheaply. Bots can praise a product, defend it from criticism, ask “scripted questions,” and stimulate discussion. They can even argue, because conflict boosts reach. The algorithm sees activity. The platform sees engagement. The viewer sees “social proof”.
And so a person enters a crowd that has already been staged in advance. Some of the comments may be real, some paid, some automated. The boundaries blur precisely where the audience should have been able to find additional verification. Comments, once a space of spontaneous collective experience, become yet another advertising stage.
In that scene, the most real thing is often the money leaving the customer’s account. The face may be paid for. The experience may be invented. The comments may be artificial. But the transaction remains entirely concrete.
The AI influencer and the face without a conscience
Now let us look at things from this perspective. Imagine you are a marketing agent. You spend your days researching creators down to the smallest details. Not just what they talk about, but their entire lives — whether they are married, whether they have children, what their political views are. All of that goes into a spreadsheet, and it is a considerable amount of work, even if specialized AI tools are helping you do it.
But once an industry has spent enough time measuring and optimizing people, it is only logical that it begins to dream of a person without human limitations. A human being, however optimized, will always be too unpredictable for the industry. What if a creator has a “moment of moral awakening” and — perhaps somewhat strategically, in an effort to preserve their audience — turns on the toxic brand that had been feeding them, then announces to their followers, with an emotional apology, that it was all a lie after all?
There can also be far “milder” inconveniences. A real creator can refuse a campaign, ask for more money, make a mistake, anger their audience, while your brand is already tied to them. A synthetic persona has none of these problems.
That is why the AI influencer is the perfect worker for the advertising machine. It can look however the market demands. It can speak in any tone. It can sell shampoo, a crypto app, a dietary supplement, and a fake sense of happiness all on the same day, with as many faces as you want. It does not age, burn out, go on vacation, or enter into conflict with its own conscience.
But here we are in an interesting transitional phase. A human being no longer sells only their labor. They sell their face, voice, movements, and personality pattern. UGC contracts increasingly raise the question of perpetual rights to use a person’s likeness and recorded material. In other words, in the age of generative artificial intelligence, such contracts can become the gateway to a digital double that keeps selling even after the real person has lost control.
So you break through with your own work, you need money, and an agency approaches you offering it. But in return, you have to sign a contract that comes closest to the metaphor of “selling your soul.” Once the algorithm is trained on you, once it has harvested every detail, you become irrelevant. The AI double takes over and continues the work. It handles reviews, fills in the story from “personal life,” whatever is needed. Will people notice? That is the question. Some will, but fewer and fewer every day. Partly because of naivety, of which the world still has plenty, and partly because AI keeps improving, slowly closing the last gaps in the uncanny valley (something we wrote about several years ago; see: “The Uncanny Valley” and the Robots Trying to Escape It).
The internet after trust
The deepest consequence of this economy is not just bad advertising. It is the constant exhaustion of having to verify reality. Is this person real? Is this experience real? Is this comment real? Is this recommendation paid for?
The internet user becomes an exhausted forensic investigator of their own attention. As they scroll, they are simultaneously assessing motives, patterns, tones, and traces of automation. This is no longer rest. It is cognitive labor. Paradoxically, that very exhaustion benefits the advertising machine, because a tired person is more likely to accept shortcuts.
Digital capitalism has turned free time into the passive labor of watching, reacting, and feeding the algorithm. Even when we buy nothing, we produce data. Even when we skip an ad, we teach the system how to keep us next time. The audience participates in its own profiling simply by being present.
That is why authenticity is becoming a rare and expensive resource. It will no longer be recognizable by a bad camera or a spontaneous tone, because those methods have already been commercially absorbed. If it can be recognized at all, it will be by a boundary. By a clear standard, but also by a stubborn human inefficiency that the algorithm does not like.
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