The end of (most) influencers
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
Despite the doom-and-gloom headlines, AI is not going to take everyone’s jobs. But it does look like it’s coming for influencers.
Being an influencer is, frankly, a brutal gig. Most creators on TikTok and Instagram earn $100-$200 per video. The hours are long, the algorithm is opaque, and the competition is relentless. People choose this career because there’s always the dream—the possibility of going viral, of breaking through. But let’s be honest: only about 0.001% ever “make it.” For everyone else, it’s a grind.
And now those everyone-elses just got a very serious competitor.
Kling 2.6 Motion Control works differently from the video generators you’ve seen before. Instead of generating footage from a text prompt, or using an editor where you manually set camera movements, it takes a reference video—any video of someone moving—and transfers that motion onto a pre-generated virtual character. It’s essentially face and body swap, but with frame-by-frame precision. The AI maps body dynamics, hand gestures, facial expressions, and even lip sync onto your chosen avatar. The results are so good that X, Instagram, and TikTok are currently flooded with motion control demos, with people genuinely shocked at what’s now possible.
You start with two inputs: an image of your “influencer” (which can be AI-generated or a real photo), and a motion reference video showing the movement you want. The system extracts the movement frame by frame and applies it to your character. You can choose “Match Video” mode for longer clips (up to 30 seconds) that prioritize exact skeletal movement, or “Match Image” mode for shorter clips (up to 10 seconds) that better preserve your character’s appearance and texture. The AI handles the rest—stretching, aligning, and rendering so the final output looks like your virtual person actually performed those moves.
It is not always the zero-effort magic some demos suggest. Getting clean results still requires decent lighting on your reference video, no rapid cuts, and a character pose that roughly matches the motion you’re applying. But it as an afternoon project, the worst case.
So, are all influencers finished?
Not quite. When production costs trend toward zero, only two moats remain: what is worth creating, and who is creating it.
The first is about taste—the ability to sense (not just observe) cultural currents and trends. We wrote an entire series about taste in AI marketing, first part is here. You can’t prompt your way to that intuition. The second is about identity. When content becomes unlimited, its origin becomes the differentiator.
A virtual influencer can perform the dance, but it can’t have the backstory, the parasocial relationship, the three years of showing up every day that makes an audience actually care. The biggest stars—the ones who’ve built real trust and a recognizable voice—will be fine. Maybe even better off, as the noise around them gets easier to tune out.
For everyone in the middle, the end of the road is now clearly visible.
And for us, marketers, virtual influencers are no longer a gimmick or a novelty campaign. They’re a real option. Not for replacing your highest-value creator relationships, but for the volume plays—the localized variations, the A/B tested ad creative, the UGC-style content at scale.
— Torsten and Peter
3 AI Marketing Tools To Try Today
HeyGen
Create professional video content at scale with AI avatars—HeyGen lets you produce personalized videos without cameras, crews, or studios.
Fathom
Record, transcribe, and summarize every meeting automatically—Fathom joins calls, captures key moments, and delivers formatted notes to your CRM without you lifting a finger.
Pictory
Transform long-form content into short videos automatically—Pictory extracts key points from articles or recordings, adds visuals and captions, and creates social-ready clips in minutes.