Are consumers ready for TikTok’s AI acceleration?

The AI revolution sweeping the entertainment industry will rage on in 2025. In recent weeks, TikTok owner ByteDance has provided a deeper look into how AI will impact social platforms. Through a series of quick-fire announcements, it revealed TikTok’s AI tools for advertisers as well as separate creator features for building AI-powered chat bots. ByteDance designed these tools to increase engagement with audiences, hoping to capture more consumer attention in the oversaturated attention economy. 

However, as exciting as these tools are, they pose some important questions:

·      How ready are consumers for yet another frontier in AI innovation?

·      Will they accept an AI clone of their favourite creator? 

·      And does authenticity matter when AI has created 90% of an advert? 

The jury is still out. Up until this point, AI avatars have been mostly confined to the experimental stage. 

While TikTok is not the first mover on AI, it is taking things to the next level

In 2023, Meta was among the first to try and take AI avatars mainstream when it launched AI persona chatbots based on celebrities like Snoop Dogg. However, ByteDance’s announcements appear to push the boundaries of what is possible.

On the advertising front, TikTok has rolled out its Symphony Creative Studio. This AI-powered video generator enables brands to instantly turn product information on a website into a video ad narrated by a digital avatar. 

For smaller companies with constrained marketing budgets, this provides a cheap and quick way to connect on social. It also offers bigger companies a faster way to ideate and iterate on concepts. 

However, the true value may not be found in how fast a single video can be published, but how quickly audience data can be used to refine and publish multiple videos to increase the chances of virality. 

At its heart, Symphony Creative Studio narrows the gap between ideation, content creation and audience analytics. It can auto-generate videos daily based on previous creation behaviours or that day’s viral trends. It is the brand campaign equivalent of switching on an auto pilot. 

Like many TikTok features, AI avatars launched first in China

This update came as TikTok’s Chinese sister platform Douyin also kicked off V Project, an initiative enabling its Chinese creators to outsource fan engagement through AI versions of themselves. 

Theoretically, these always-on chat bots can maintain engagement on a 24/7 basis so creators can spend more time creating the content fans want to consume. 

Features include AI private messaging, AI comments, AI group chat, AI interactive spaces, and AI live streaming. These digital avatars aim to not only mimic a creator’s personality but how they think. 

ByteDance is making a big bet that audiences will offer an equally warm reception to digital AI-powered avatars as they have done to their human counterparts  – and early indications suggest they could be right. 

Consumers are receptive to virtual influencers

Alongside their broader views of AI’s involvement in entertainment, MIDiA is tracking consumers’ perception of virtual influencers.

Our research found 46% of consumers liked the idea of being exposed to AI content on social media in Q1 2023, compared to 19% who disliked it. The largest appetite was among 25-34-year-olds, of which 62% liked the opportunity. 

Meanwhile, brand awareness of the virtual influencer Lil Miquela reached 40% across the UK and US in Q3 2023, compared to YouTube’s MrBeast at 61%. 

This is all about demographics. While authenticity matters to consumers, the acceptance or rejection of AI avatars depends on how they are created and who they target. 

British retailer Marks & Spencer, which targets an older female customer base, launched the virtual influencer, Mira, to attract younger customers but faced a backlash from its core audience who wanted more real models over the age of 40. 

However, The Clueless, the AI modelling agency behind Aitana Lopez (337,000 Instagram followers), said its virtual influencer success comes from “meticulously crafting” personalities aligned with hobbies and interests that are reflected in posts.

MIDiA believes audiences will accept AI avatars as long their approach is transparent, entertaining, and in tune with audience values. This poses a threat to human influencers, who will struggle to match the cost, flexibility, and capability of virtual influencers if they don’t embrace AI avatars. This disruption will be accelerated by brands who could cut out the middleman (human influencers) by creating and controlling their own AI-powered influencers.

Beyond selling: The ‘’human’’ element is important 

However, audiences will tire of AI avatar chat bots if they are used cynically. Brands risk alienating users if they spin up a virtual influencer, secure engagement and then quickly abandon it once the conversion rate target is achieved. This would be bad news for ByteDance. 

Social platforms awash with dud AI avatars would mark a departure from the very thing that delivered their rapid rise in the first place: authentic human creators. Therein lies the rub: audiences will abandon AI avatars as quickly as they embrace them if they fail to match the value of what human creators have achieved. ByteDance will need to strike this balance if they are to turn the AI avatar opportunity into a reality.