The AI Wave Hits Live Streaming: Who's Cashing In First
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The AI wave has reached live streaming, and the first to benefit aren't just knowledge payment bloggers selling courses, but also 'AI streamers'.
They either appear as foreign beauties leveraging eye-catching personas and topics to attract followers for product promotion, or as single women delivering 'inspirational content' aimed at either driving sales or converting male followers into paying users.....
These 'AI streamers' and 'AI beauties' are being mass-produced and templatized through AI technology. Not only that, but chaotic phenomena such as selling courses and distribution have emerged around this industry chain. Now, platforms have begun to take action to regulate these issues.
Recently, the official Weibo account of 'Douyin Security Center' issued an announcement regarding the governance of improperly generated virtual characters using AI. The announcement stated that the platform recently discovered accounts still improperly using AI technology to generate virtual characters to publish content, and the platform has taken severe action against them.
For violations involving the improper use of AI to generate virtual characters, the platform will remove the offending videos and impose penalties on the violating accounts, including revoking their posting and monetization privileges, wiping out their followers, and banning the accounts. The platform will also utilize models and technical identification capabilities for long-term systematic detection and handling. Regarding violations involving AI-generated virtual personas, the announcement lists several categories, primarily including the use of AI to create fake foreigners, fake elites, and deceptive avatars designed to manipulate interactions.
Douyin's move brings to mind the previously viral "Russian beauty"—Natasha.
This was a character created by the account "Natasha Imported Foods," portraying a Russian beauty who claimed to have lived in China for 8 years, loved Chinese culture, and wanted to marry a Chinese man. After gaining followers, the account monetized by promoting Russian products, amassing over 200,000 fans at one point. The path of 'beautiful woman persona + precise topic targeting for fan acquisition + monetization through sales' seemed flawless at first glance. However, the account was later exposed for creating its 'Russian beauty' image through AI face-swapping technology, using the appearance and voice of Ukrainian YouTuber and influencer 'Olga Loiek' without authorization.
The account has since been banned.
In reality, AI-powered hosts, particularly 'AI beauties,' have become increasingly common on Douyin (TikTok's Chinese counterpart). After studying these accounts, we found that these 'AI beauties' either directly generate virtual personas, creating single mature female characters, or even personas like 'single mothers' and 'divorced women,' such as 'Xiao Yi Mei' and 'Li Guo, Ni Yao Me.'
These accounts can be said to be mass-produced, with highly templated and formulaic approaches.
Another type involves using the image of a real-life host to generate a virtual avatar that closely resembles her, such as 'Chocolate, Xiao Ning Meng.' This is an entertainment host who currently has over 10 million followers. It uses AI to generate personal virtual avatars, mainly for short videos, with content focused on emotional 'chicken soup' topics. Examples include "Deceiving a man who gives you his all" and "What is the personality of a man who often cries," aiming to attract followers and divert traffic. This type of content appears very rough, with mismatched lip-syncing and visuals, clearly generated by AI.
It can be seen that both types of accounts target male audiences.
Among them, the former type places shopping carts in short videos to monetize through product sales, primarily featuring daily necessities and men's products. For instance, the AI host "Chen Jiali" on Douyin, with 505,000 followers, has products in her showcase ranging from a few yuan to dozens of yuan, with some products selling millions of units. The latter primarily attracts fans through short videos and monetizes through live streaming rewards. The content of these short videos is precisely targeted at male audiences, with both the hosts' images and video topics designed to cater to their preferences.
Besides Douyin, Xiaohongshu also has a group of bloggers featuring AI beauties as protagonists.
These bloggers create personas similar to "travel bloggers" or "street photography models," and the content they publish is almost identical, mostly consisting of AI-generated beautiful photos. For example, bloggers like "cyberAngel" and "往之," who focus on street photography, have already surpassed 10,000 followers. Currently, no obvious monetization channels have been found, with the most common method being group-building for traffic diversion. Apart from these mass-produced 'AI beauties', the current AI boom has also spawned malpractices such as selling courses and AI agency distribution.
According to media reports, some merchants sell so-called AI face-swapping courses for 29.9 yuan, with material packages containing thousands of celebrity photos; others sell scams disguised as technology, also offering face customization services with prices ranging from 2,000 yuan to tens of thousands of yuan.
Around the AI course industry chain, a gray distribution market has formed. During the 315 period, media exposed frauds related to 'digital human source manufacturers' and 'digital human agents'. Some unscrupulous merchants are using the "digital human industry as the trend of the times" as a gimmick to sell AI agent services for hundreds of thousands of yuan, claiming that "as long as you pay to become an agent, you can distribute digital human technology to lower-level buyers without any qualification review, set your own prices, and even beginners can participate, making millions effortlessly with their eyes closed."
However, "AI face-swapping" not only involves potential infringement but also leads to frequent live-streaming bans due to poor performance, repetitive scripts, and stiff presentations.
Now, with increased platform regulation, such irregularities are being further addressed. Searching for keywords like "AI anchor courses" or "AI live-streaming courses" on Douyin no longer yields related paid course content. It's evident that under the current trend, the application of AI in live streaming has spawned numerous irregularities. In reality, better utilization of AI technology could not only reduce costs but also bring new imaginative possibilities to live streaming.
Industry insiders have pointed out that currently, AI streamers still face many problems and challenges. They are primarily used in scenarios that don't rely heavily on content output, such as group-buying live streams in the local lifestyle sector, or as 'stand-ins' for human streamers during unavailable time slots.
In fact, AI-powered live streaming sales are nothing new anymore. In 2023, with the gradual maturity of AI technology, leading live streaming companies have begun to heavily invest in AI-powered live commerce, with Qianxun being one of them.
Reportedly, Qianxun Holdings has been laying out in the AI field early on, with its two subsidiaries, Qianyu Intelligence and Link, specifically dedicated to developing AI-powered live commerce.
On August 9, 2023, at the "Redefining the Vitality of Live Streaming - 2023 AI Innovation Conference," Qianyu Intelligence and Link, under Qianxun, respectively launched the "AI Digital Human Live Streaming Business" and the "One-stop AI Intelligent Live Streaming Comprehensive Platform," featuring multiple AI digital humans resembling Wei Ya. Not long ago, top livestream host Xinba, who announced stepping back from e-commerce streaming, stated that he would spend the next two years learning AI technology.
Leading organizations and hosts are betting on AI because they see the new possibilities that come from integrating AI technology with livestreaming.
At the same time, AI hosts also have significant growth potential in the vast overseas market. Many AI developers are currently focusing on improving related products. FlashCut Intelligent held an online launch event for its 2024 BocaLive AI Digital Human Intelligent Broadcasting System on March 21. The newly launched AI can directly help merchants automatically write foreign language live-streaming scripts, supporting 29 languages and rich AI voiceovers.
The AI anchor has a vast language library capable of translating dozens of languages. Merchants can input Chinese product descriptions or live-streaming scripts, which will then be automatically converted into multiple languages such as English, French, and German.
According to the "China AI Digital Human Market Status and Opportunity Analysis, 2022," it is predicted that by 2026, the market size of AI digital humans in China will reach 10.24 billion yuan. The prospects of AI digital humans are vast, but the extent to which they will integrate with live streaming in the future remains unknown.