You have followed them for almost a year now. Liked their photos. Reposted a quote once. Shared a caption in your group chat that felt weirdly specific to your week. Never obsessed, never fan-level… but they stayed on your mind. A kind of digital background character. Familiar. Subtle.

They never overposted. Never vanished. Never said too much.

Just… showed up. Consistently. Elegantly. Always at the right time.

You thought it was just good taste. Aesthetic discipline. Maybe therapy.

But then something shifted.

One post landed a little too well. A sentence that felt like it had been listening to your last thought. Then another. Then a pattern. No mistakes. No changes in tone. No messiness. No voice notes-turned captions. No broken edges.

You checked again. And that’s when it hit you. They don’t exist. Not like you thought. Not a creator. Not a person. Just a pattern. An engine. An idea shaped by scroll behaviour, tuned by data, wrapped in stillness.

And the strangest part? It didn’t feel wrong. It felt… familiar. It’s like one of those episodes of Black Mirror that you watch with a smirk… until you realise it’s not about the future. It’s about right now.

We Know It’s Not Real. But We Feel It Anyway.
The wild part? You keep following.

Even after you realise they are not real. Even after the spell is broken. Because something about the content still lands.

We are wired that way. We tear up during ads. We feel grief when a fictional character dies. We talk to podcast hosts in our heads like we have met them. Our brains are not built to vet for reality… they are built to respond to feeling. And the feeling is still there.

AI doesn’t beg for your attention. It does not push. It listens. It waits. It watches what you linger on, what you skip and what you save without liking. Then it posts… like a mirror, but quieter. It knows how to use silence. How to say less. How to let a single sentence feel like a confession. The caption doesn’t scream, “Relatable!” It just is. That’s why it works.

There is no personality to manage. No chaos to dodge. No bad takes to hold your breath. No influencer voice cracking mid-collab because life happened. Just rhythm. The feed shows up. Clean. Timed. Relevant. A little cold, maybe. But never needy. And weirdly? That starts to feel safer. You don’t have to worry about being manipulated. You already were. But gently. Softly. Intimately. Not because it fooled you. Because it understood you.

Brands Are Experimenting with AI Influencers. But It Will Not Stay Experimental.
Right now, it still feels like a novelty An AI influencer pops up on your feed… perfect skin, thoughtful captions, unreal consistency. You pause, maybe share it with a “Wait, this isn’t a real person?” reaction. Brands do the same. They test the waters. One off collabs. Carefully managed campaigns. PR-safe experiments.

But that’s just the start. Because once you run the numbers, it stops feeling cute and starts feeling inevitable. Real influencers are messy. They trend, then vanish. They post, then pivot. They burn out. Overshare. Ghost entire campaigns.

AI doesn’t. You don’t need to fly it out. You don’t need contracts, clauses or coaching. You brief it once, and it responds in five voices for five markets by the time your meeting ends. Not everyone’s doing it yet.

But the brands watching closely? They’re already planning for the moment when AI creators stop being a headline… and start becoming infrastructure.

Because what they offer isn’t hype. It’s reliability. And in this business, reliability scales better than personality.

You Blinked. The Content Started Making Itself.
There used to be a process. You would brainstorm. You would brief. You would write. You would shoot. You would revise. You would wait.

Now? You give it a mood. It gives you a campaign. At recent developer conferences, tools have been unveiled that can generate entire videos from a simple text prompt… complete with music, dialogue and camera movements. These are not just prototypes; they are being integrated into creative workflows.

Right now, it is still a bit clunky. Still needs a human in the loop. But that loop is shrinking. Fast. Soon, you won’t need to write a script or hire a crew. Describe the scene and the content materialises… tailored, timely and on-brand. This is not about speeding up the creative process. It is about quietly removing it altogether. We are not far from campaigns that build themselves…autonomously, endlessly and perfectly timed to whatever the scroll demands that day. You won’t even need to hit publish. It will know when to drop it. And who is it for? And how it should feel.

The era of content creation? It’s about to become the era of content automation. And most people won’t even notice when the shift completes… because the feed won’t feel different. It’ll feel the same. Just… smoother.

The Founder Who Never Was.
You know the brand. Small-batch outdoor gear. Beautifully functional. Birchwood handles. Matte khaki rolltops. A tagline about returning to the wild. Every post looks like it was taken after a long hike at dawn.

And, you know the founder, too. Or at least you think you do. He is the guy in flannel, standing beside a campfire in the Alps or the Hindu Kush or maybe just some photorealistic rendering of it. Always journaling. Always chopping wood. Talks about building things slowly. Talks about legacy. Shows up in just enough stories to seem real, but never too much. He looks like someone you would trust with a compass.

But here’s the thing: he’s not real.

He is the constructed face of the brand. A digital character. Maybe built by a solo creative. Maybe a team of two. Doesn’t matter. The conviction is sharp. The storytelling is airtight. And the aesthetic is so consistent, so lived-in, so intimate… you don’t just follow the brand. You follow him.

You don’t buy the gear because it is gear. You buy it because it feels like he made it. For you.

And when every post lands like a page out of a life you wish you were living, you don’t care that it’s fiction. You care that it feels true. And that’s the shift.

The Cast Ensemble.
It starts quietly. You follow one account… soft captions, a face that shows up just enough to feel familiar. Then you notice someone in the comments. Different vibe. A little louder. They tag each other. Tease each other. The tone’s personal. Like they know each other offline.

Then there is a third. Then a fourth. Suddenly, you are not just following people. You are following connections.

There is a friendship arc. Maybe a slow-burn romance. They react to each other’s posts like friends would… supportive, snarky, emotionally timed. Someone gets left out of a trip. Someone posts a vague caption, and the others flood the comments.

None of it feels fake. If anything, it feels too good. Like the version of closeness, we wish we had… just enough conflict to be interesting, but never messy enough to fall apart.

And you realise: this is not a glitch. It is design. They’re a cast.

Not actors. Not influencers in a campaign. Just… fictional people with emotional continuity and really good lighting. You don’t remember when you got invested. But now you care. You want to know if they will make up. If they will launch something together. If that vague caption meant something. It’s not just content anymore. It’s something closer to a story. And you didn’t start watching it. It started happening around you.

The Self-Writing Feed.
It doesn’t follow a script. Not really. The cast has a story… but it’s not fixed. It moves with the audience. A comment thread leans into heartbreak? The next post echoes it. A sarcastic reply gets traction? The tone shifts. A certain duo start getting fan attention? Their interactions slowly become the centre of gravity.

None of it feels forced. Just…
responsive. Like the story is watching you watch it. And you are not the only one. Thousands of others are reacting, resharing, and stitching together meaning from fragments. The mood becomes a signal. The signal becomes a structure.

And the story adapts. Not suddenly. Not loudly. But gradually. Emotionally. The captions get softer. Or sharper. The dynamic between the two characters cools. Or flares. A conflict starts to build…not because it was planned, but because the audience started craving it.

The content doesn’t just perform. It listens. And when enough people start listening back, the loop closes The fiction adjusts to keep you near. The arc evolves to hold your attention. You think you are just following characters. But in the background, the characters are following you.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Real. Just Close Enough.
It shows up. Says the right thing. In the right tone. At the right time. You feel something. You don’t ask where it came from. Or who wrote it. You don’t pause to question the source.

You just keep scrolling. And that’s how it happens. Not with a shift. Not with a shock. But with something that feels so normal, so natural, you barely notice it at all.

Sheryar Latif is Chief Strategy Officer, Bullseye DDB. sheryar@be.com.pk