An AI-generated influencer entered Alabama 'RushTok'; some fans didn't care that she was fake

"OK, hi everyone. I'm Janie," says a curly-haired, bespectacled redhead, clasping her hands in front of her as she shyly addresses a camera from her dorm room.

"It's day one of rush at the University of Alabama," Janie continues. Then, she mentions where she got each item of clothing she's wearing: a pleated skirt from Abercrombie, a knit top from J. Crew, socks from Target and sneakers from Nike.

That's because Janie isn't real.

Every detail of every video on Janie's account, from her dorm room, to her outfits, to Janie herself, was generated by artificial intelligence.

The experiment showed how quickly some viewers could detect AI-generated content and how willing some were to continue watching even after they knew Janie wasn't real.

"The image, video, audio models are getting very human-like very fast. I think we probably cross the uncanny valley in the next six months," Moore said in an interview with Fox News Digital.

"And, so, it means that how we as humans are able to detect AI-generated or AI-assisted content and how we interact with it is just going to become even more important because we're going to have a flood of this content, and it's going to be, in many cases, indistinguishable across all of our channels."

Moore said she created Janie as an experiment to see how consumers react to AI.

"Philosophically, that's an interesting question for me. What do people feel about AI content? What do they feel when they don't know it's AI? What do they feel when something they liked, or loved, or hated or were interested in turned out to be AI?"

Moore primarily used ChatGPT and MiniMax to breathe life into her fake influencer. She pulled a real video of a University of Alabama dorm room off of the internet and uploaded it to ChatGPT. Then, she prompted Janie to have frizzy red hair, a pair of glasses and style from the 1960s. ChatGPT produced a still image of Janie in the real dorm room photo, and the "RushTok" influencer was born - or generated, at least.

For each TikTok, Moore animated Janie by feeding the still dorm room image into AI video model MiniMax H3. She used ChatGPT to produce prompts to feed into MiniMax, shaping how Janie would move, what she would sound like and the scripts she would follow.

Moore chose RushTok to introduce her AI influencer to the world after watching the annual phenomenon for the past five years. She said it was "the perfect testing ground" for her experiment for several reasons. Janie wouldn't be selling anything or hurting anyone, and RushTok naturally draws high traffic and has a low barrier to entry for new creators. With other PNMs participating in the trend, audiences would experience Janie alongside real humans posting similar content.

On the first day of Alabama Rush, Moore introduced Janie to the world with an OOTD video. Reactions to Janie were split in the comments.

"I would say anyone under maybe 25 immediately clocked her as AI," Moore said. "But anyone in the older demographic, which is much of the Bama Rush audience, was, I would say, fooled by her and just wishing her luck and sending her good thoughts in the process."

By the second day of the experiment, the audience was mostly onto her. Moore said people took to Reddit to discuss Janie, created commentary videos on TikTok and corrected anyone who thought Janie was real in her comment section.

"By day two, day three, the comments were filled with still some people who were saying really nice things. And people would comment and tell them, 'Hey, this is AI.' And they'd be like, 'I don't care. She seems so sweet. Like, I want her to succeed.'"

As the audience caught on, Moore said she had to change her strategy. She realized that people were still willing to watch AI-generated content as long as it was entertaining enough. So, she started dropping hints in the videos and watched as digital sleuths would proudly point out clues in her comment section.

Moore said that humans are getting better at detecting AI quicker than AI generation is improving.

"It seems like, at least for now, that latter curve is higher slope. It's inflecting faster. The average human can still tell an AI video from a truly human video."

While humans could generally detect the AI content, Moore claimed TikTok, for the most part, did not immediately detect AI in most of the videos.

For the experiment, Moore decided not to label her videos as AI when she uploaded them. Of the 20 AI-generated videos she uploaded, Moore said TikTok only initially flagged 8 as containing AI-generated media. As of the date of this publication, TikTok displays an AI-generated media warning on 16 of the 20 AI videos.

"The platforms themselves are going to have a hard time detecting this content at scale, especially when the models are changing and the strategies are changing, and people are always gonna find ways to make this undetectable," Moore said.

Moore ended her experiment with a video of herself explaining to the audience who she was and why she decided to create Janie. She was shocked by the positive comments she received on the post.

Moore predicts that more consumers will start using AI tools to create human-passing content, but she says it will have to compete with human content to gain emotional investment and be as interesting and entertaining to viewers.

"I understand why people are fearful of AI because, so far, if they see AI content, it's usually something that's kind of trying to trick them versus something that is honest with them and shows them how they could get the same value," Moore said.

"The more that we are kind of honest and straightforward as people using AI around how we use it and how much of us as humans still goes into that, it'll hopefully lead to a world where AI is just another tool that allows humans to do things that are even more human."

The Alabama Panhellenic Association declined to comment on Moore's experiment.