Could They Be Any More Famous?
Celebrities work overtime to keep their fans engaged and their personal brands relevant. Digital avatars are helping them extend their online reach beyond the physical—and redefining fame as we know it.Could They Be Any More Famous?
Celebrities work overtime to keep their fans engaged and their personal brands relevant. Digital avatars are helping them extend their online reach beyond the physical—and redefining fame as we know it.
Cookiee Kawaii is twerking alone in a green room. Not the kind of green room where famous guests wait before they’re ushered on stage to film a TV show, because, well, that is no longer something emerging musicians get to do during a global pandemic. No, the 27-year-old Jersey Club rapper is dressed in a T-shirt, ripped jeans, and sneakers, getting low in a room that is completely green. She’s surrounded by a sphere of 106 cameras, some of which are infrared, and all of which are pointing directly at her. The chorus of her single “Vibe (If I Back It Up)” plays as she mimics the lyrics, lip-syncing and swiveling her butt toward an invisible dance partner. About 15 seconds into her groove—or the length of your average TikTok video—a voice yells “CUT.” One hundred and fifty gigabytes worth of footage hum through a brigade of servers in the hall outside. Just like that, a hologram is born.
Cookiee (147,000 Instagram followers) is at this studio, deep in the Valley, in part to solve the problem of being everywhere and nowhere on the internet. “Vibe” picked up on TikTok in early February, bouncing through the platform like the reverb from a block party sound system. The song’s saucy chorus, with its mattress squeaks, whip cracks, and repeated directives to “throw it back” made it an ideal soundtrack for a TikTok challenge. Soon enough, it became the musical backdrop for almost 2 million posts, ranging from makeup tutorials to dance videos from the platform’s most famous users.
But the difference between a traditional radio hit and a TikTok sensation is credit. Whoever originally uploaded “Vibe” to the platform hadn’t properly tagged it, causing the song to be shared by TikTok users over and over again without its proper name or tracking information. As posts using the song multiplied, Cookiee found herself canvassing the social network, laying claim to her work on random teens’ posts. “I was going on every page and commenting, like ‘thank you for using my song,’” she told me after the shoot had wrapped. “I really worked hard to put my stamp on it.”
Even after she resolved that issue, Cookiee still faced the larger task of recognition. By design, TikTok’s users, not musicians or choreographers, are the stars of its platform. And because “challenges” are the social network’s vehicle for virality, the originators of songs and dances are often obscured. Cookiee may be the singer of “Vibe,” but the challenges set to her song outperformed her own content. (Not to mention, COVID-19 had hamstrung her opportunity to tour.) So, when she finally made it out to Los Angeles this summer to film a music video, her manager put a trip to an augmented reality startup named Jadu on the itinerary.
Jadu doesn’t trade in the kind of smoke-and-mirrors techniques that brought Tupac Shakur to Coachella in 2012. Its founder, Asad Malik, is quick to point out that most of the recent “holograms” in popular culture were actually conjured using an 1800s illusion technique called Pepper’s ghost. Rather, his company captures what he describes as “volumetric video”—performances shot from every angle that can be shrunk down to files small enough to load on a smartphone. Put more simply, it’s a three-dimensional GIF. Sort of like that one viral Snapchat hot dog filter, but instead of an anthropomorphized meat product, it’s Vic Mensa.
The result is a tool built to reach today’s online zeitgeist, or pure TikTok bait. With the Jadu app, anyone with a smartphone can download a celebrity’s hologram, film a video with it, and share it. Meaning a teen could plop the dancing fem-bot singer Poppy (1 million Instagram followers) right next to her dad as he naps on the living room couch, or cozy up to the heartthrob ceramicist Dax Newman (4.7 million TikTok followers) as he throws a bowl on his pottery wheel. By creating these human replicas, Jadu hopes to bridge a gap in a world where musicians are expected to be influencers, and influencers are expected to be everywhere.
In the first six months of its existence, the company has banked more than 30 celebrity avatars, a collector’s set of Gen Z personalities. The challenge of each shoot comes down to capturing the subject’s “brand” and ensuring users can interact with it. In Cookiee’s session, for instance, Malik encouraged her to dance as if another person was in the frame. “You want to go for something that’s going to be memeable, that people are just going to want to be really excited to create with,” Mac Boucher, a partner at Jadu (who also happens to be the electro-pop singer Grimes’s brother) told me that day.
Cookiee won’t be able to connect with fans at a club or a concert venue for the foreseeable future, but her hologram will function as an online ambassador. She can go live on Instagram (her preferred medium) while her hologram can dance alongside new fans on TikTok without ever breaking a sweat. Crucially, it will help people match her face to “Vibe” on an app where virality belongs to the power users. “This came right on time,” Cookiee said of the Jadu shoot. “People don’t always know that I’m the one who sings it. They need to see that I’m the one making the music.”
Cookiee welcomes the opportunity to share a sliver of her publicity tour with a hologram. That she’s willing—and eager—to do so is evidence of just how virtual her industry has become. Today, celebrities are brands and brands are celebrities. A large online following on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok translates to promotion deals and casting opportunities. Higher click-through rates on product links yield more commissions. A viral TikTok challenge is often the difference between a local musician and a top 100 Billboard artist.
In the same way we survey our friends about potential Instagram captions, Will Smith relies on an experienced production team to pump a steady stream of content into our online feeds. It goes without saying that if an influencer has over 1 million followers, they also have merchandise plastered with their name, likeness, or inside jokes. An L.A. company named Brud has even proved that a celebrity doesn’t need to physically exist to make money. Its computer-generated avatar, Miquela Sousa (2.7 million Instagram followers), lands a steady stream of sponsorships with high-end brands thanks to her feed of artsy “selfies,” and fictional person dramas.
Recognizing the voracious demand for celebrity content, startups are getting into the business of digital doppelgängers—what some VCs are calling “synthetic” and “personal” media, or what you or I might call “a premise fit for a Black Mirror episode.” Jadu films holograms of rising artists that are ready-made for TikTok and Instagram. A company named Genies “clones” celebrities, then brokers brand deals for said computer-generated clones, with the help of $38.8 million in venture capital funding. Wave orchestrates interactive online concerts from platform to platform—a process that its investor, the record executive Scooter Braun, says is “revolutionizing the ways artists share their music and engage with the next-generation concert goer.” Its latest show, a performance from an animated avatar of the Weeknd (24 million Instagram followers), drew more than 2 million unique users on a TikTok livestream. A few minutes into the airing, viewers were prompted to type “YES” or “NO” to determine whether the “After Hours” singer would lick a magical frog. Reader, he licked it good.
Though each of these businesses comes with its own share of buzzwords, they all boil down to a simple sales pitch: Avatars can show up, ready for the job, when their human counterparts can’t. “There are physical limitations that the real world’s put on us,” Jake Becker, who works in Genies’ in-house “Avatar Agency,” told me over Zoom. “Whether that be time, location, physical demands, you’re not able to physically do something or you’re physically not interested in doing something.” In moments of mortality, of lethargy, of apocalyptic circumstance, our digital renderings can put on a smile, and take the reins.
Some of the most internet-savvy stars already know this. A few years ago, the Kaji family—which runs the wildly successful YouTube channel Ryan’s World (26.5 million subscribers)—introduced an animated version of their 8-year-old son to protect their lucrative brand as he inevitably grows up and loses interest in toys. “At some point, he’s not going to want to do it anymore,” Mae Karwowski, the CEO of the influencer agency Obviously, told me. “But this way you have a cartoon that looks like him that gives you a whole business that you can really build off of.”
Grimes took a similar route when she was tasked with promoting her fifth album, Miss Anthropocene, during the late stages of her pregnancy. In January, she launched separate Instagram and Spotify profiles for a doe-eyed, elven alter ego she called War Nymph. “Having a digital body allows me to keep working throughout the later stages of my pregnancy, and after I have my baby, so I can spend more time with them,” Grimes told The Face in a February interview that ran alongside images of a young War Nymph in a gold Balenciaga ball gown. “It’s hard for me to do photoshoots and fit into clothes at the moment, but War Nymph is here in your magazine promoting my album for me.”
For advertisers who are looking to collaborate with celebrities, avatars offer speed, flexibility, and reliability. And that’s especially handy when talent goes missing. When the mother of Atlanta rapper Offset couldn’t find her son the day he was scheduled to fulfill a social media sponsorship, she contacted Genies. (This according to a conversation the company’s CEO held at a conference last year.) The company’s emoji-like avatars—whose oversized skulls and twiggy necks resemble bobbleheads—can be designed and manipulated quickly, using a rig that functions like a skeleton and an existing library of facial expressions, movements, outfits, and settings. His Genie was posted on Offset’s Instagram that same day, plugging the brand in his place, and has since appeared in a handful of campaigns on his feed. Through a PR representative, Offset said the company has “given me the opportunity to expand my brand and promote several big projects, including my first solo album.”
Beyond offering a celebrity’s stamp of approval, avatars can reach new audiences more easily than their human counterparts. When 100 Gecs played Minecraft’s virtual “Square Garden” concert in April, the zany electronic duo were fully transformed into blocky figures, mingling with the game’s many users on a designated dance floor. That same month, Travis Scott was transformed to resemble a more extravagant version of a Fortnite avatar for his own experiential concert. Wave CEO Adam Arrigo now envisions each platform as a stop on a virtual tour. “You used to map it out into terms of physical locations, like Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles,” he told me. “But we think about it in terms of Fortnite, Roblox, TikTok, Twitch.”
Geographic and aesthetic flexibility means Wave can mold itself to the culture of online communities. On Twitch, where the main attraction is internet personalities livestreaming themselves as they play video games, Wave plotted a performance by electronic musician Lindsey Stirling by outfitting her (and her violin) in full motion capture gear. In the resulting performance she appeared as a glowing, dancing avatar—much like the kind you’d encounter in a video game—whose environment shifted from song to song to match the music, occasionally interrupted by a live video feed of the real her, in the bottom right side of the screen, speaking to the audience. For the mobile-first TikTok—where users are more accustomed to prerecorded videos—Wave created an animated Weeknd concert that included users through a choose-their-own adventure vote (i.e., whether the “After Hours” singer would lick a frog); some audience members’ handles and comments were even incorporated into the background visuals. Musicians aren’t the only ones who’ve recognized the power of these types of appearances. Recently Joe Biden’s presidential campaign debuted Animal Crossing avatars of the candidate and his running mate, California Senator Kamala Harris, alongside virtual yard signs that players can place outside their virtual island homes.
The desire and demand to be omnipresent—amid a global pandemic, a surprise hurricane, a packed schedule—is transforming the humble avatar from gimmicky online persona to indispensable online delegate.
“You have that one traveling identity,” Becker told me. “The more places that it’s used, the more people that it’s seen by, it continues to grow past financial value, into someone’s personal brand.”
But with this boom of celebrity mini-mes comes a new branch of entertainment that must establish its own norms and standards. Avatar ownership, authenticity, and exposure present new challenges within an industry that has traditionally thrived on protective agents and prudent exclusivity. Once upon a time we collected autographs; now we can collect caches of digital figurines. There is more access, in its way, to more kinds of famous people than ever before. At the heart of these issues drives one central question: What even is a celebrity, anyway?
From The Stepford Wives to Westworld, science fiction has long warned against the soulless clone who seeks to eliminate and replace the human race. The idea that a lifelike rendering could hold value against the person it was modeled after was once so absurd that society could only conceive of it in the form of a horror story. Today, it’s a practicality of the internet. The past two decades of the consumer web have primed us for the blurring of humans and their digital representations. And though our current existence is far less miserable than pop culture once imagined, our digital replicas have more influence than ever.
Most millennials have spent their entire lives accumulating avatars, choosing, collecting, and discarding them like pairs of sneakers. The same characters we directed to fight, build, and explore in video games during the ’80s and ’90s became conduits for socializing in early-aughts virtual worlds like Second Life. It wasn’t until we could personalize and share them en masse that they became intertwined with our own public identities. By 2013, more than half of the adult population in America had a smartphone, services like iMessage and WhatsApp kept people in never-ending group chats, emoji were a new form of punctuation, and selfies had returned with a vengeance. That was the year that Bitstrips, a little-known Canadian company that allowed people to insert drawn versions of themselves into customized comics, launched a mobile app. And, over the span of just two months, users created more than 30 million avatars. These Bitstrips characters—what would later be known as Bitmoji—were a new way to outsource reactions and moods over text. “It’s difficult to express unabashed excitement, genuine affection, or emotional vulnerability in the presence of another human being,” Amanda Hess wrote about the company in 2016. “Why not let cartoon you do it instead?”
Major companies took notice. That same year, Snapchat bought Bitmoji and integrated its illustrations into its app. Just a few months later, Apple rolled out “animoji,” which allowed people to overlay popular emoji (notably the one shaped like a turd) over their faces to mimic their expressions in real time. The company has since expanded the feature to include more lifelike “memojis” and make static versions of these customizable illustrations available to its billions of users. As these digital renderings went mainstream, enterprising celebrities—especially those whose value revolved around having an especially recognizable face—cashed in. Kim Kardashian West debuted “emoji packs” that played off of her most-GIFed moments on reality television, and a handful of other famous singers with young, loyal fan bases followed. Paired with instagram’s Photoshop-happy influencer class, these customized cartoons set the stage for computer-generated celebrities like Miquela Sousa. The 19-year-old digital doll is now joined by the likes of Shudu (206,000 Instagram followers) and a handful of other personalities that make up a virtual modeling agency called The Diigitals.
Whether Miquela and her various copycats have staying power remains to be seen, but her ability to land high-profile brand deals and press coverage nevertheless poses a threat to visual professions. So far, CGI models have been used in fantastical advertising stunts that highlight their novel non-humanness. Balmain dressed up Shudu and two other digital models in metallic ’90s-era streetwear as if to say “we know about technology.” A Calvin Klein video ad from last year depicts Miquela kissing supermodel Bella Hadid while a voice suggests “life is about opening new doors.” But when these avatars are embraced for retail modeling opportunities at a high scale, they could actually threaten the jobs of their human peers.
“That’s been the path of disruption in entertainment, the things that are ‘more mass produced,’ like e-commerce,” Sinead Bovell, a model and futurist, told me. She recently wrote a personal essay in Vogue confronting the possibility that an artificially intelligent avatar could come for her job. Models typically earn a large part of their living with shoots for retail websites, which require giant productions involving hair, makeup, stylists, and photographers. Winnowing that down to a graphic designer or two would save time and money. One retailer, a German company named Zalando, has even published machine learning research on how to manipulate images so a single photo of a garment can generate multiple “looks” on different models. As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, these digital images may function as hyper-realistic, cost-effective mannequins on the average clothing website. “I see it proliferating throughout the whole industry,” Bovell told me. “It really takes away a lot of obstacles that you face, or the inefficiencies with trying to put together a shoot.”
No human model can compete with the cost-efficient productivity an avatar offers, but she can join them. Bovell has been advised to create her own digital replica, and she envisions that it will eventually be an industry standard to do so. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a Kardashian has one of those in the works,” she said. “They’d be smart to be doing that.”
The average model may not have the cultural capital of a Kardashian, but they still have a leg up over their digital counterparts. The companies behind computer-generated models have been accused of cultural appropriation. Shudu, the avatar, is a woman with dark-brown skin who has appeared on Instagram in iindzila, a type of neck ring worn by the Ndebele people of South Africa. But her creator, a former British photographer named Cameron-James Wilson, is a white man. “Blackface minstrels, who originated during the antebellum period, allowed white audiences to indulge their intense fascination with blackness without having to interact with actual black people,” the author Lauren Michele Jackson wrote for The New Yorker in 2018. “I thought of this history when looking at images of Shudu.” Because of this blowback, Wilson chose not to monetize Shudu, and his company has pivoted to rendering avatars of real models instead.
This pushback suggests that even if avatars can land gigs, the public still values once-removed authenticity. People are used to encountering the famous and beautiful via collections of pixels on their smartphones. But their connections to those pixels remain firmly rooted in some human experience. Meaning that the origin of a digital replica is, in some cases, as important as the image itself. “Your unique brand is what seals the deal, or what helps to build your career,” Bovell said. “I think in many ways there’s a lot of opportunity for our uniquely human selves to be present in the evolution of tech as it rolls out. But it’s not going to happen without you being proactive.”
Even if entertainers are able to effectively market and multiply their own digital avatars at an unprecedented rate, it’s unclear how that will affect their personal value. Though the basic principles of supply and demand in the entertainment market still hold, social media has complicated the Hollywood publicist adage to be mindful of overexposure. For one, research shows that the influencers and celebrities who overshare on the internet actually strengthen their fans’ emotional investment (what’s sometimes referred to as “parasocial relationships”). For another, the sheer competition makes it much harder for any one star, aside from a small class of global phenomenon, to hog the public’s attention. “Overexposure is less likely today because the sheer number of celebrities is much higher, as is the attention we pay to them,” Mathieu Deflem, a sociology professor at the University of South Carolina who wrote a book about Lady Gaga’s fame, told me via email. “Each celebrity has a smaller piece of the pie because there are too many celebs to celebrate.”
In that sense, avatars play to our fractured media landscape. In lieu of touring to promote his recent album, the Weeknd set a collection of digital Weeknds loose in the media: as anime and 3D avatars in music videos, as a character on American Dad, and as an animated performer in a livestreamed TikTok performance. (There have been so many versions of the Weeknd lately that a fan made a composite photo of them, which the singer shared on Instagram with the caption “INTO THE MULTIVERSE.”) There will always be fans who strive to connect with a tangible version of the stars they worship—whether by purchasing vinyl or paying a premium for in-person meet-and-greets—but the style of each avatar speaks to a different audience, depending on its preferred medium. “There has been discussion among some social theorists for a while now that the difference between reality and representation is not always clear,” Deflem said. “The celeb avatar takes that idea a step further by means of technology. To some extent today’s celebrity is always mediated, whether it is a video of their real self or a cartoon. Avatars are an extension thereof.”
Ultimately, a celebrity avatar’s ability to connect with its audience is key to its success. And to that end, one Silicon Valley startup may be quite helpful. The AI Foundation started three years ago with the goal to provide the entire human population—or, at least, the part that has disposable income—with intelligent replicas. (The company still has no estimate for how much the service might cost customers.) It has earned $27.5 million in funding, and recently partnered with Microsoft to launch a tool that detects deepfakes ahead of the presidential election. The startup’s very existence implies that our modern-day value as individuals lies in the information we collect and distribute. But practically speaking, the service that it provides is just helpful. The AI Foundation’s avatars look like you might on a video call (from the shoulders up) and function like personal assistants, answering emails, replying to social media activity, and virtually attending meetings.
As the company’s CEO, Lars Buttler, put it in a recent YouTube video: “It will look, sound, and think like you, learn everything about you, and stay in-sync through dynamic mapping that happens through ongoing conversations.” Buttler is bald and pale, and speaks with a slight smile and a German accent. We’d never met in person before, so it took me a moment to pick up on the same kind of stiffness in his expressions that I’d seen in doctored videos. The clip was of his AI replica speaking.
“The idea came from, wouldn’t it be really, really cool to have an extension of you that could talk and take your capabilities further,” the real Buttler told me later that same day over a Zoom call. Given both of our shaky internet connections, he appeared even more jolted than his avatar. “It would just be trained by you. You would have complete control over it and it would just share your values and your goals and nobody else’s.”
Though Buttler envisions a world in which this is a possibility for everyone, the AI Foundation’s early prototypes are of public figures. “We think that celebrities are a completely natural way to start.” The Hollywood talent agency Endeavor is one of the startup’s investors, and Butler says there’s a “large list” of people who are eager to try the technology, some of whom are “already in training.” He imagines that, in the future, celebrities may charge people to spend time with their avatars, much like the in-person meet-and-greets at concerts. In January, the techno-wellness guru Deepak Chopra went on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to demo the AI avatar that the company had made for him, introducing it on an iPad as “Digital Deepak.” “It’s read all my books, articles,” Chopra said. “It has access to libraries. It will one day speak to the grandchildren of my grandchildren and tell them about this show.” Per Fallon’s request, Digital Deepak then led the entire room in a round of meditative breathing exercises.
Because the AI Foundation’s avatars are still in the early stages of learning about their human subjects, their presence still feels a bit like a party trick: momentarily impressive but not yet ready to hold its own in a main event. (In fact, when Buttler’s avatar presented at a recent virtual beings conference, onlookers wondered whether he was real until a Zoom glitch caused him to repeat the phrase “Oh! Zoom is acting weird” in the exact same tone and cadence.) But as all avatars become more autonomous and capable, the question of who owns them becomes more urgent. Digital avatar companies don’t necessarily have the same policies. Because Jadu currently fronts the cost of production for artists, it holds the rights to their holograms, a strategy that CEO Malik says would allow the company to eventually license them to record companies. Each of Becker’s clients own their own Genie, but they must still rely on the company’s technology and resources to put it to use. Though Buttler doesn’t yet know for sure how the AI Foundation will make money, he is passionate that his customers have control over their own avatars.
“We think that the creator, the individual in every single case needs to own their own AI and everything that comes with it, and should have the right to say what they want to use it for, what it is trained on, whether it should exist or should be shut down at a moment’s notice,” he said. “That’s the same for celebrities. They’re also human beings. This is an extension of them, of their brain.”
Not long after I spoke with Buttler, I stumbled upon a tweet from the Weeknd that said “show me your stats!” and included a link. I had recently watched the singer’s cartoonish avatar dance along to new songs from his latest album, After Hours, on TikTok, and the internet seemed to know that.
The link took me to a blank website that began filling up with text. “Hey there, it’s Abel,” it read, as in Abel Tesfaye, the Weeknd. “How are you?” Before I could answer, the page directed me to turn on my sound and connect my Spotify account for a “personalized moment.” I complied, and a photorealistic avatar of Tesfaye from the shoulders up materialized on my screen. Looking straight at me, in a nose bandage and the signature red suit he and his many avatars have donned since January, he began commenting on the data Spotify had fed him about my listening habits. (Full disclosure: Spotify owns The Ringer. But I have been a user since its 2011 launch in the U.S.) He highlighted the number of times I’d listened to his new album (not much), then moved on to our history. “Damn, you and I go way back,” he said. “You’ve been listening to me on Spotify since 2014. I remember those days.” I recalled the time I saw him live at Barclays in 2015, drunk from overpriced beer and pulsing with the energy of thousands of audience members in the stadium. I scrolled through my iPhone photos to look at the blurry photos I took that night. A rush of nostalgia ran over me, and I made a note to rewatch Uncut Gems.
When digital Tesfaye ran out of streaming data to discuss, he mentioned something about the time of day (afternoon), and day of the week (Saturday). He then thanked me for stopping by as his album began to play, hinting that our time together was up. By normal standards, it was a terrible conversation, unnatural and rushed. At times I’d felt ashamed for not being a more dedicated fan. And he was a uniquely terrible listener.
It later occurred to me that, in most circumstances, a real-life conversation with any musician as famous as the Weeknd wouldn’t have been much different. There’s only so much of a celebrity to go around on any given day. Our interactions with stars are, by necessity, mediated. To the rest of the world, they’re larger-than-life personalities filtered through an amalgamation of images, videos, and text. Their digital avatars are too. In one way or another, fame has always depended upon the illusion that the worshipped is speaking directly to the worshipper. The only difference is, now, sometimes, we might be able to talk back.