What to know about A.I. travel influencers 

Aitana jumps off a yacht in Ibiza. Ester gets cozy on a private jet. Nyah poses in Santorini. They’re the smiling platonic ideal of the travel influencer: young, attractive, posting from exotic locales. But something’s off in these Instagram posts, and it’s not a heavy filter.

None of the women are human. They’re images generated by artificial intelligence.

AI image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney have made it easier than ever to create lifelike renderings of people, places and things. Over the past two years, users began churning out Facebook clickbait, glossy headshots and political deepfakes. Brands, tourism boards and tech-savvy opportunists followed, making synthetic travel influencers who share travel tips, selfies, cliché musings and risqué bikini shots.

Some look like beautiful video game characters. Others are hyperrealistic and human-passing, unmasked only by the mention of “AI influencer” in their profile or the occasional #aitravelinfluencer hashtag.

But the ranks of AI travel influencers are growing. Their creators are calling their arrival an exciting new opportunity - a way to embrace new technology to reach a broader audience. Their detractors call it disturbing - threatening to cut real people out of real jobs, while providing questionable recommendations.

How can you trust a travel influencer who’s never traveled?

Das is nicht human

Emma introduces herself in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, one of the most famous historic sites in Germany. She has straight blonde hair, cut just above her shoulders.

“Hi, I am Emma,” the video begins, the voice enunciating with a crisp British accent. “And I am the first AI influencer of Travel Destination Germany.”

The movements of Emma’s mouth would not pass a lip-reading test; they rearrange in a pixelated jerk. A car honks in the background, as if Emma were recording near the busy street shown in the background.

Germany’s tourism board launched Emma on Oct. 17. Part travel influencer, part AI chatbot, “she” is on Instagram and the German National Tourist Board (GNTB) website, where people can ask “her” for travel advice.

Emma can instantly answer questions like “What’s Germany’s best kept travel secret?” (The Zugspitze region, the Danube Gorge, Hohenwarte Dam and Amrum island). The program gets stumped with nuanced topics, like: “is Germany safe for solo female travelers?”

“Please phrase the request a little bit differently,” the chatbot replied, with a link to fill out a contact form. “Maybe we are talking past each other here? Find more infos about successful communication with me here.”

In an email to The Washington Post, the German tourism board said that Emma was “part of our ongoing efforts to stay at the forefront of digital innovation in tourism” and to “ensure we’re dynamically meeting the needs of the modern traveler.”

Virtual influencers seem like a natural progression in the AI gold rush. Airlines already use AI for pricing and reservations. Hotels use it to streamline housekeeping. You can ask ChatGPT to plan a trip to D.C. - albeit with a few foibles.

Marketing expert Angeli Gianchandani, who teaches at New York University, sees the appeal for brands in adding virtual influencers, too.

“These AI influencers are quick, and they eliminate travel expenses, the accommodations, the talent fees,” Gianchandani said. Plus, “you can have them on 24/7 across different platforms, across different regions and countries.”

Emma, for example, “speaks” more than 20 languages.

In the hours after Emma’s launch, social media commenters - who identified themselves as Germans, travel professionals and content creators - reacted sharply. The most common criticism was that people preferred to see the tourism board hire “real people” who could physically explore the country, instead of using a robotic substitute.

“When people plan trips, they want to know what they’re actually going to experience,” Christina Dubin, a human digital content producer living in Geneva, wrote in an email to The Post.

The GNTB says Emma wasn’t created to replace human influencers. The organization said it partnered with more than 100 influencers last year and that its relationship with content creators remains “fundamental” to the group’s marketing strategy.

Kirstin Hertel-Dietrich, a tour guide in Würzburg, Germany, who was among the disappointed commenters, said she appreciates the tourism board trying to “move with the times.” But she hopes it ends the program.

“In a world where you really have to be careful about fake news, fake images and fake voices, this is the worst possible way to promote digitization,” Hertel said in an email.

‘She’s a traveler that wishes to inspire people’

Click on Sena Zaro’s Instagram profile and you’ll learn that she’s a “Storyteller” who shares travel “tips and inspiration.” Then, next to a robot head emoji, you’ll find out she’s a mirage. What you won’t read is that she’s a marketing tool for a hotel brand - although her creators prefer to call her “the very first AI influencer in the hospitality industry.”

Sena Zaro is a collaboration between Cenizaro Hotels & Resorts - whose core portfolio includes nine properties across Asia and Africa - and the AI consulting firm Bracai.

Using generative AI technology, Bracai creates images of Sena and shares them with “her” travel advice and videos (which are written and recorded by real people) from destinations Sena “visits” - destinations where Cenizaro has properties.

“She’s a traveler that wishes to inspire people,” Finn Christian Arctander, Bracai’s Norwegian founder and CEO, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But apart from being inspirational, we also wish that she provides very good travel tips.”

In a recent Instagram post with the location tag set to “Marrakech,” Sena stands in a busy street, her hands tucked in the pockets of her wrinkled white slacks. Her low-plunging blouse matches her glossy onyx hair. The next slide of Sena’s post shows a quote about Marrakesh that has been attributed to designer Yves Saint Laurent, albeit without the attribution.

Arctander says his team does “a lot of research” to create Sena’s content. For the Marrakesh post, Arctander says it helped that he’s been to the Moroccan city, and he works with locals to come up with travel tips.

The sites that made Sena’s final top five places to visit in Marrakesh included the city’s main market, a square within that market, the city’s most famous mosque and tombs and a Cenizaro hotel.

The ads behind the AI

If you’re casually scrolling through Instagram, you could easily mistake Sena for human. Bracai designed her to look as realistic as possible; it even made up her family tree. (Her “mother” is Chinese Indonesian, and her “father” is Tunisian, Arctander said.)

Many of her commenters seem to think she’s real.

“Relax and enjoy!” one person wrote on her post “from” the Maldives. Then there are comments from other AI influencers; Arctander said his company is not behind such engagement, and is not sure what attracts AI or “bot” commenters.

Instagram gives users the option to add an AI label disclaimer to their posts, in the same location as a location tag or music credit. Instagram only displays one such label at a time, so if a post has two or three, the platform will rotate between them. When you tap to expand the AI info, Instagram displays a basic explanation that explains the poster “added an AI label to this content | AI may have been used for a wide range of purposes, from photo retouching to generating entirely new content.”

Instagram also has “Branded Content Policies” that require influencers to use a “paid partnership label” if a brand provides gifts or free products or services in a post. The policy is not strictly enforced; many influencers’ posts forgo them.

Would an AI influencer be required to follow such policies? Does Sena need to disclose she’s in a partnership with a hotel brand?

Meta - Instagram’s parent company - did not respond to interview requests. Earlier this year, the company said in a press statement that it planned to start labeling AI-generated content.

Sena’s early posts had neither paid partnership nor AI labels. As of this week, only a few of her posts show an “AI info” tag. All of Emma’s posts to date include the AI tag; most of their synthetic peers aren’t as transparent.

Automatic labeling of content is complicated, said Claire Leibowicz, head of the AI and Media Integrity Program at the nonprofit Partnership on AI coalition. Some people use AI tools to create images out of thin air. Others may use them to lightly edit an existing photo. If every image is flagged, the term “AI-generated starts to lose its meaning,” Leibowicz said.

Still, she said, more regulation is necessary.

“We need government to ultimately enforce or have accountability for some of these disclosures,” she said.

Arctander said Bracai’s intention isn’t to trick anyone into thinking Sena is real, but he acknowledged that there’s no mention of her being AI in each post or that she’s affiliated with a hotel company. That’s for the same reason a human influencer might not want to draw attention to their sponsored content: It would look too much like an ad.

“When you have an influencer that’s sponsored by someone, it becomes very much directly marketing,” Arctander said. “Whereas for Sena we’re trying to make travel tips, we’re trying to make inspirational content - although in those places where Cenizaro has establishments. And she’s also staying there, and she’s tagging them. So there is a relationship, but it’s not completely clear.”

A dirtier secret

Followers of Emma may be influenced to travel to Germany. Followers of Sena may be influenced to stay in a Cenizaro hotel. What about Nyah, the AI who is “sun-kissed and loving every moment in beautiful Santorini”?

Click through the link on Nyah’s Instagram profile and you’ll find more links where you can spend real human money on gifts for the virtual influencer, or subscribe to her website where she shares “intimate moments.”

Entrepreneurs create virtual influencers using generative AI software, set the influencer up on Instagram or on adult sites like OnlyFans, and have “your influencer” chat with customers, eventually earning money from them through photo sales or gifts. Build your influencer’s brand up enough and you can sell ads to companies that work with social media influencers.

Beyond enabling potential scams, Leibowicz said that unregulated AI-generated media carries “a really long list of potential harms,” like spreading dangerous propaganda or sexually abusive material. Its use also raises ethical questions, including about taking human employment and distorting beauty standards.

“It’s very context-dependent, I think, which is what’s tricky about this,” Leibowicz said.

Both the German tourism board and Arctander say there’s still room for human influencers as more virtual ones come online.

Globally, the creator economy is valued at more than $200 billion.

“I cannot think of a sector that doesn’t use an influencer,” said Cam Khaski Graglia, a content marketing manager for Influencity, a platform that connects brands with (human) influencers based in Spain.

Khaski is not worried about an AI takeover of the industry. “People do not trust them entirely because they are not human and they have been built for a purpose,” she said.

Real influencers can have ulterior motives, too, but Khaski argues the tech industry is getting better at requiring influencers to identify when they have been gifted a product or service mentioned in their content. She hopes social media companies will require more regulations for AI as well.

After her turbulent October debut, Emma returned with a second post on Nov. 8, to promote travel in Germany.