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INTRODUCTION
Relevance of the topic. Progress in artificial intelligence systems has triggered the evolution of novel paradigms of audience engagement with multimedia content. A vivid illustration involves AI influencers—synthetic avatars—computer-generated personas designed through neural-network architectures, natural-language processing, and big-data analytics. Such virtual agents are gaining traction with consumers thanks to their capacity to replicate human affect, social behaviors, and dialogic competence. They are widely deployed within marketing, programmatic advertising, immersive entertainment, and interactive education, furnishing disruptive value propositions to brands and stakeholders.
Avatars are extensively employed across multiple spheres of human endeavor and increasingly embedded in daily routines owing to advances in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and digital marketing. Below are key sectors where avatar technology shows value. Avatars are also widely used in the gaming industry. Moreover, the workers of healthcare and clinical psychology also apply to AI avatars when they face with such psychological and psychiatric challenges, as phobic disorders or neuropsychological problems. In education AI avatars are widely used in order to train students and to check the efficiency of their study. In commercial area and in the area of business AI avatars are used in order to provide efficient communication with the customers and target groups. They are even used in such area, as politics and civil right, AI avatars are used in order to organize election campaigns.
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CHAPTER 1. AI-INFLUENCERS AS A TOOL OF DIGITAL MARKETING
1.1. Definition and main difference between AI-influencers and human
An AI avatar (AI avatar, digital twin, digital copy) is an AI-created visualized character with human-like appearance, voice, and behavior. Its task is to represent a brand, product, or service in the digital space, maintaining interaction with people through online channels and providing 24/7 communication. O. Kuznetsova believes that an AI avatar is a computer-graphic character endowed with the ability to conduct dialogue and demonstrate emotions, modeling human appearance and behavioral reactions (Kuznetsova, 2025). M. Reglis believes that an AI avatar is a digital entity created based on machine learning algorithms, designed to represent a brand or organization interactively through voice, text, and multimedia interfaces (Reglis, 2025). According to A. Kaplan, an AI avatar is a virtual character that uses artificial intelligence technology to provide users with information, advise clients, and automate routine enterprise operations (Kaplan, 2019).
Now let’s study the theoretical background of AI avatar notion. Then, one must examine foundational cyberpsychological frameworks underpinning virtual identity research on anthropomorphic avatars and embodiment.
According to the two-step-flow communication paradigm developed by Paul Lazarsfeld mid-twentieth century, messages seldom transfer straight from mass media to receivers: they are filtered through intermediaries called opinion leaders. These gatekeepers decode, reinterpret, and contextualize content, thereby steering audience cognition (Lazarsfeld, 1944). In contemporary networked publics, the same mechanism operates within social media ecosystems, where algorithmically amplified virtual personas—digital avatars and influencers—serve as emergent opinion leaders. Via parasocial interaction, they modulate information diffusion, shape collective attitudes, and guide consumer behaviour.
Max Weber’s sociological concept of charismatic authority (Weber, 1947) posits that charisma constitutes a distinctive legitimacy source grounded in followers’ conviction about the leader’s extraordinary attributes. Charismatic figures stimulate inspiration, engender credibility, and cultivate intense affective attachment. In analogous fashion, contemporary anthropomorphic avatars are interpreted by users as embodying exceptional traits that elicit intimacy and credibility, a phenomenon especially observable within human-computer interaction platforms delivering individualized encounters with virtual agents.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu conceptualizes social capital, underscoring how relational linkages and networked structures condition individual life-chances and access to resources. Social capital denotes the aggregated, actual or latent assets mobilized through durable webs of reciprocity, trust, and in-group recognition. “The social world is accumulated history, and if it is not to be reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects. Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its “incorporated,” embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor” (Bourdieu, 1986). Employing avatars within digital fields enlarges participants’ relational graphs, consolidating bonding and bridging ties across virtual communities. Such embodied proxies facilitate symbolic interaction, enhance perceived belongingness and inclusion, and catalyze emergent configurations of networked social capital.
Drawing on Herbert Kelman, social influence manifests in compliance, identification, and internalization. Compliance denotes normative conformity to collective standards; identification reflects aspirational alignment with reference group others; internalization signifies informational assimilation of another’s value system (Kelman, 1958). Within immersive virtual environments, avatars mediate identification and internalization: users engage in avatar-self convergence, parasocial modeling, and symbolic adoption of their preferred digital protagonists’ attitudes, scripts, and moral frameworks.
Grounded in contemporary theoretical frameworks, we conceptualize an AI avatar in the following way: an AI avatar constitutes a synthetic agent generated through machine-learning algorithms that embodies opinion-leadership qualities, demonstrates social presence, establishes parasocial ties, and deliberately modulates recipients’ attitudes and behaviors. Such functional properties render avatars strategic instruments for public-opinion formation, brand communication, service endorsement, and the amplification of online engagement and interaction. Familiarity with scientific media-psychology and communication-science models enables scholars and practitioners to decode the persuasive mechanisms whereby virtual agents impact audiences, thereby cultivating novel research agendas and optimized digital-messaging solutions.
Social media play a great role in our life. Ellison suggests that “intense Facebook use is closely related to the formation and maintenance of social capital. In their survey of undergraduates at a large university, Facebook use was found to be associated with distinct measures of social capital, including bridging social capital (which emphasizes the informational benefits of a heterogeneous network of weak ties) and bonding social capital (which emphasizes emotional benefits from strong ties to close friends and family). Moreover, Ellison found evidence that self-esteem may operate as a moderator of the relationship between social network site use and social capital. That is, young people with lower self-esteem appeared to benefit more from their use of Facebook than those with higher self-esteem. However, with data at only one point in time, it was not possible for Ellison to establish any time order to the relationships among Facebook use, self-esteem, and social capital”(Ellison, 2008).
Artificial intelligence (AI) avatars rank among the most transformative innovations in present-day digital communication ecosystems. With computational power accelerating, these anthropomorphic software agents further dissolve boundaries separating organic interaction from algorithmic synthesis. Their deployment across omnichannel touchpoints—from conversational commerce assistants to immersive media characters—underlines widening relevance for sectors spanning healthcare, education, retail, and entertainment. Comprehending their influence requires analyzing converging technical affordances and sociocultural repercussions. On the engineering side, architectures comprising natural language processing pipelines, multimodal generative adversarial networks, and reinforcement learning protocols furnish real-time intent recognition, sentiment analysis, and context-adaptive dialogue. Yet significance extends past utility: by mediating affect, identity, and trust at population scale, avatars possess the symbolic power to recalibrate norms, expectations, and decision-making behaviours (Verkhovskaya, 2024).
Examining antecedent communication theories yields nuanced explanations for the contemporary emotional traction of algorithmic AI avatars among audiences. Foremost, Lazarsfeld’s two-step flow paradigm depicts avatars functioning as mediating personae effectively linking information sources to audience networks. Through algorithmic curation and micro-segment targeting, these virtual agents steer attitudes while retaining perceived authenticity amongst. Additionally, Weberian concepts of charismatic domination clarify how specific avatars secure parasocial loyalty and fandom. When crafted through semiotic coherence, such digital figures radiate appeal and authority, serving as mentors (Lazarsfeld, 1944).
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LIST OF REFERENCES
1. Атагулыева А., Елагина О.А. Создание и внедрение новых продуктов // Актуальные вопросы инноватики, менеджмента и бизнес-информатики. Сборник научных трудов конференции Кафедры современных технологий управления. Москва, 2025. С. 6-12.
2. Белозеров С.А. Аватар-опосредованная деятельность и виртуальные миры // Дистанционное и виртуальное обучение, 2014. № 9 (87). С. 37-52.
3. Верховская А.С. Создание цифрового аватара // Междисциплинарные исследования: опыт прошлого, возможности настоящего, стратегии будущего. Сборник статей XVIII Международной научно-практической конференции. Москва, 2024. С. 62-73.
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