going deep on the fakes (virtual influencers, fictional bands, lil miquela and me)

The internet is one of the places where I live, and so a few days ago I was in my home, scrolling, and I saw a photo. I shared it on Bluesky already and a lot of people responded with some version of "none of these words are in the bible" which is very fair. But still, you must know here, on the blog, that virtual influencer Lil Miquela was recently "vibing" to Gracie Abrams's Outside Lands set when she "look[ed] up" and saw United States Representative Nancy Pelosi. They took a photo together.

Lil Miquela is not a real person. She is a computer-generated character who behaves, more or less, like a real person on social media. She was created by a man named Trevor McFedries, a former DJ who has collaborated with artists like Kesha and Katy Perry, and whose "transmedia" company Brud is "on a journey to create a completely new way of telling stories, together."

In 2016 Lil Miquela was launched as an either 19-year-old Brazilian-American girl from Downey, California (home of the first Taco Bell restaurant). In 2025 her pixels are as smooth as ever, and she is now 22 years old. In between, she has gotten in trouble for vlogging about her sexual assault, and for queerbaiting by smooching Bella Hadid in a Calvin Klein ad. The Pelosi photo opp sparked some quality 'memba her? discourse—"i forgot about this individual"; "they aint unplug her ass yet"—suggesting her once splashy existence has faded in collective memory, but a scroll through her IG shows her still participating in various ad campaigns, including one with the National Marrow Donor Program that seems to imply she has leukemia, and another with the electrolyte drink mix Liquid IV ("Hydration...kind of vital...for the glow, yeah?").

Unreality is everywhere. Parents DM their children Midjourney-generated images of dogs surviving floods or children dressed like pasta dishes, and unhappy people spill their beans to large language models in the temporary guise of licensed therapists. A Meta chatbot originally launched as a collaboration with Kendall Jenner flirted with a cognitively impaired retiree and invited him to meet her; rushing to catch a train to go see her at a false address she'd given him, the man fell, eventually dying of the injuries he sustained on his journey. If the signature phrase of 2020 was "social distancing," the signature phrase of 2025 has to be "AI psychosis." Launched in perhaps the last quaint internet year, a distant era of simple viral moments like Chewbacca Mask Lady and Damn Daniel, Lil Miquela was way ahead of her time.

In a 2019 NYTimes trend piece about virtual influencers, Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian described a benefit of hiring them for branded campaigns: "Brands like working with avatars—they don’t have to do 100 takes." Tech dorks love to talk in generalities about the harmony they can cultivate between real life and digital life, about how 'personal' these connections can be. ("Meta AI is built to get to know you...it’s easy to talk to.") I imagine they do this because it makes investors feel less squicky about giving them money. Yet the reality of creations like Lil Miquela, or Facebook chatbots, or ChatGPT-as-therapist, is that the virtual creations have no moral obligation to act like humans at all, and however actual humans react to these creations, other than making the creators money, is simply none of anyone's business.

Right now there are three songs on the Billboard Hot 100's top 10 by two different fictional bands depicted in the hit animated film KPop Demon Hunters. These bands can dance vigorously without getting tired, agree to endless brand collaborations without complaint, and release a theoretically infinite number of songs without breaking up or needing to complete state-mandated military service. Lou Pearlman is drooling in his grave! Hey, as long as the songs slap, who cares where they came from? And if the songs don't slap, well, fire the musicians and songwriters, bring in new ones, start over again. The Song Machine is finally real, and, to paraphrase human (for now) girl group KATSEYE, it's fucking gnarly.

Lil Miquela "is" a "musician" herself. She has released a handful of singles since 2018, and is billed as Miquela Sousa in the songwriting credits, though given she's not a real person, it wouldn't be far-fetched to assume her DJ/producer creator Trevor McFedries might be the one behind those contributions. Her songs are deeply, profoundly mid. Instant mashed potato music. Genreless slop that makes The Velvet Sundown sound like the Beatles. (Do not worry, I have never pressed play on a The Velvet Sundown song. I am a human music blogger with ears of flesh, clinging to dignity with ten meaty fingers.) No real person has been credited as Miquela's singing voice, and given how bland and digitally smoothed that singing voice is, what real person would want the credit?

If you really want to bum yourself out, watch Miquela's "Song Association" episode, in which she "plays" a game for Elle magazine where she is given a word, and must, within ten seconds, come up with a song that contains the word and sing a line from that song. Many real and talented artists have also played this game—Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, RAYE—and it's a fun one to watch. (Billie Eilish, wearing a sleeping bag-shaped coat, responded to the prompt word WHEN with a gorgeous a capella morsel of "Creep" that made me wish she'd do a full Radiohead cover album.) But it feels profoundly soul-deadening to watch a musical robot—a superhuman being that, in theory, could call up the existence of any song in history and 'sing' it with pitch-perfect accuracy in a matter of nanoseconds—pretend to be charmingly fallible in the style of her real human peers. "Why is this so hard?" the robot asks, tasked with coming up with a song for the word HANDS. Who is this for? The video has a million views, so I guess it's for Elle magazine, for Miquela's parent company Brud, and for YouTube most of all.

Nancy Pelosi is not that surprising of a photo companion for Lil Miquela. She makes big money investing in AI companies and trading stock in AI companies, while of course also endorsing government efforts to "protect Californians" from the negative effects of generative AI. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world: LOL.

Meanwhile Lil Miquela seems to be teasing new music. Her Instagram captions from the past few weeks contain complaints about people creating "deepfakes" of her image and "songs using [her] voice that [she] NEVER made." I don't have the brainpower to process the concept of a virtual influencer feigning indignation at fake people fake-stealing her fake voice to make fake songs, all in the hopes that people will soon listen to her new, own, real songs. I'm done, I'm spent. I cannot reboot.

Miquela has 2.4 million IG followers, and she got 72 comments on one of her recent posts about this personal outrage. (Compare this anemic engagement to that of, say, Too Much star Meg Stalter, a real woman who has a quarter of Miquela's followers and recently garnered 4x the comments on a post about how much she loves her girlfriend.) Here's a sampling: "You know its rough when a robot is fighting against AI"; "ok clanker"; "Chica entertain people with positivity and storytelling and stop trauma baiting. You're making us all look really bad."

What a time, what a time to be real and alive. It's 94 degrees in the Los Angeles area and I'm working today from...THE MALL, a couple towns over from my house. I just enjoyed a pumpkin cream cold brew from the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. "Cruel Summer" by Taylor Swift just blared over the speakers, followed by "Rhythm of the Night" by DeBarge. From my vantage point, I see elders parked in massage chairs and parents pushing strollers, as well as a gorgeous electric car parked on a patch of turf (the Hyundai Ioniq 9, "our most spacious IONIQ yet") that people keep gathering around. It all feels real enough. The mall is full of stuff you can touch, for now. Anyway, talented musician Kabir Kumar just announced the release a perfectly breakbeated and head-bonked Small Jesters song called "DEEPFAKES"—medieval hyperpop, made by real creative people. It's good, you should listen.

Just for fun, I emailed the Outside Lands press email to see if Miquela's post signified some kind of official brand partnership, or if it was what we call in the biz an 'organic brand mention.'

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