The rise of deepfake influencer marketing in the Metaverse

Did you know of the growing trend where influencers are not actually wearing the clothes they are modelling?

According to a recent Vogue article, an increasing number of influencers promote clothing without actually wearing it in real life. Instead, they are wearing digital versions of physical clothing. For e-commerce brands and influencers, this is a win-win. Say you're a business looking for an influencer on the other side of the world to promote your cool-looking t-shirt. Instead of sending them physical samples, you could send them a "digital sample."

But it's not just social media influencers who can use this tech. This week Snap announced that it's testing a new integration that will allow users to try on branded t-shirts and hoodies virtually.

By 2025, 90% of visual content could be deepfake
This is according to Nina Schick, the author of "Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse". She interviewed experts on the topics and many of them predicted that "within the next 5 to 7 years, 90% of video content online is going to be synthetic", ie., they will be deepfake technology.

That timeframe is likely to be even shorter for images. Virtual clothing app Dressx provides an Augmented Reality experience for users to try on clothes virtually using their "Meta app for the Metaverse" (clearly wanting to hit two buzzwords in the same tagline!).

Farfetch has become one of the first large retailers to test the practice of digital sampling by digitally dressing influencers to promote the launch of its new pre-order offering from brands including Balenciaga, Palm Angels, Khaite, Off-White, Oscar de la Renta, Dolce & Gabbana, Nanushka, Casablanca and Nicholas Kirkwood.

Wiser! Take: This is yet a further example of how the Internet is evolving into its next generation. Whether you want to call it Web3 or the Metaverse or just the Internet is frankly irrelevant. Because the point is that it is happening and it's immersive. Immersive being the key word that defines this next generation of the Internet.

And it is happening across all forms of media. In text, we have a plethora of AI tools (often powered by GPT-3) that can write copy, generate advertising and product descriptions, and some even claim to write entire blog content. I use one myself in Genie.io, an AI-powered reading and writing tool that I use to summarise articles to create Twitter threads. In a previous issue of Wiser! I covered the OpenAI tool called DALL·E. This technology will let you create images from text (you just describe what you want and it gives you images in return). It is not unreasonable to expect that this will eventually automatically create videos too from words.

Of course, the downside is that eventually, the tech will become good enough that you won't have people like me doing what I do. Or High Street shops with actual real clothes in them for people to try on. Or film sets on location to make movies.

Or maybe it won't. Yesterday I listened to the Sway podcast when Kara Swisher spoke with the godfather of VR, Jaron Lanier. It's a great listen with a chap who was at the forefront of virtual reality before Mark Zuckerberg was born. He said, and I paraphrase:

"the best thing about VR is when you take your headset off and see the world as it really is."
Enough said!

To see visuals and videos to bring this to life, go here to the Wiser! Newsletter...
https://rickhuckstep.com/wiser46-deepfake-metaverse-substack/