Bodyless at Coachella?
AI influencers can't go to Coachella. Looking at Instagram, it seems different. By AI avatars and celebrities
Screenshot of an Instagram post with an AI image.
(Image: grannyspills / Instagram)
The last of two weekends of the Coachella Festival is taking place in the coming days – a melting pot for celebrities, influencers, and content creators in the Californian desert. However, not all media professionals are actually on site. According to the US news portal The Verge, an increasing number of social media posts are coming from AI influencers, i.e., virtual personalities.
The images manipulated with AI tools show the supposed influencers next to well-known celebrities, dancing in front of one of the stages or posing on the festival grounds. Even though the flawless staging of the images is noticeable, many of the AI photos look real. This is not only because the quality of AI-based image generation is constantly improving. The backgrounds of the AI photos from Coachella also convey credibility because they often depict real existing buildings or scenes from the festival grounds.
Thousands, sometimes millions, of followers
The posts by AI influencers from Coachella attract a lot of attention. The Instagram account Granny Spills, a flawlessly styled AI grandma, has more than two million followers as of April 2026. In the past few days, the account has published several photos and videos that supposedly originate from this year's Coachella. Photos showing the AI grandma posing with stars like Justin Bieber or Kylie Jenner have garnered several hundred thousand likes.
Other well-known AI influencers on Instagram may have fewer followers compared to the AI grandma. With several hundred thousand followers each, ammarathegoat, miazelu, or anazelu reach a broad audience on social networks.
No labeling of AI content
The problem is that many of the contents generated or manipulated using AI are not labeled as such. The captions of the Coachella posts, for example, give no indication of the use of AI. Only in the bios, the description texts of the mentioned Instagram accounts, are there occasional clues. However, most Instagram users will have the AI-created Coachella posts randomly fed into their feeds, where the clues are not visible.
AI Slop becomes a problem
AI slop is now flooding the internet. Estimates suggest that one to two fifths of the content published online is no longer human-made. The production of AI content not only consumes large amounts of energy. The AI content, optimized for visibility, captures attention that is then missing from human creative works published online.
AI-generated content also contributes significantly to the erosion of trust in reputable media. In Germany, an incident in ZDF's “heute journal” recently caused a stir, where a report was broadcast with an AI scene and out-of-context video material. Also in the context of the arrest of Nicolás Maduro by US special forces last January, AI-generated photos of the kidnapped Venezuelan ex-strongman spread on social networks. Some media houses subsequently adopted the images in their reporting without having checked them sufficiently beforehand.
(rah)
