AI Influencers Are Heading Into Uncharted Territory

What happened

Clarissa Mansbridge spent nearly two decades building an entertainment career behind the scenes, working with the likes of Jason DeRulo and Shengo Deane, Kim Kardashian’s former bodyguard, but she rarely appeared at public events. She liked the thrill of it: building someone’s brand, swerving crises, and dealing with day-to-day challenges. Then, three years ago, her life was upended when her son was born without a heartbeat at 33 weeks.

“ChatGPT had only just come out, and there was scant knowledge among MEPs and parliamentarians about what we were regulating for,” he explains. ” More legislation is likely to add to the uncertainty.

“There are several revisions coming later this year and next that will force influencers not only to label their content, but provide transparency on where they come from, what they want to do, and how they are financed,” explains Zenner.

” Zenner worries that AI creators could be pulled into a tangle of overlapping rules: the AI Act, copyright law, audiovisual media rules, consumer protection law, and possibly even the Digital Fairness Act, the EU's proposed update to consumer protection rules for the digital age, which targets online tactics that exploit or mislead users.

“People running these accounts could find one law says their content is lawful, while another law says it's unlawful,” he says. With 60 percent of creators admitting in 2025 that their AI-assisted content had broken industry rules because of mislabeling, the risk of missteps is only set to grow in 2026. Many major social media platforms have introduced crackdowns of their own.

Why it matters

Doctors managed to resuscitate him, but the months in intensive care brought scare after scare, with no certainty that he would survive. When, eventually, miraculously, they made it home, Mansbridge, who lives in Brisbane, Australia, knew her work life would have to change due to complications related to her son’s recovery. She began experimenting with AI image-generation tools and built the “humbly wealthy, wholesome” influencer and model Mia Metaverse.

A fan of early Sims, she reveled in crafting storylines and glamorous settings for Mia to move through. Mansbridge, 34, says she now earns around $6,000 a month through brand collaborations and designing bespoke AI influencers for brands, many of which require her to sign an NDA so she can’t disclose which ones she’s worked for.

Yet despite this being her most profitable year since launching, Mansbridge and other AI creators worry that global changes to how AI content is handled on social platforms could upend their business model. Since the emergence of generative AI and text-to-image tools in 2022, creators have built lucrative accounts around virtual personalities that are more affordable, scalable, and brand-safe. 6 percent annual growth rate.

Brands are firmly on board: Research by the social agency Billion Dollar Boy found that 79 percent of marketers are increasing their investment in AI-generated creator content. But as regulation converges on this burgeoning creator industry, the tide may be turning.

From August 2, new rules under the EU Artificial Intelligence Act require AI-generated or -manipulated promotional content to be clearly labeled, while platforms like TikTok are tightening detection systems and reshaping feeds to elevate human creators over synthetic spam. For people whose livelihoods depend on AI influence, the risk is a regulatory maze, with no clear road map to navigate it.

The EU AI Act is the first-ever comprehensive legal framework on AI—a “global first,” as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called it—and aims to foster “trustworthy AI” in Europe. Under Article 50 of the act, providers and deployers of AI systems must disclose when audio, image, video, or text content has been artificially generated or manipulated.

But “where the content forms part of an evidently artistic, creative, satirical, fictional, or analogous work,” the transparency obligations are limited to disclosure that doesn’t hamper the display or enjoyment of the work. That leaves plenty of room for interpretation—and confusion. Kai Zenner, digital policy adviser to Axel Voss, a member of Parliament and a negotiator on the Act, says it was drafted too early, too abstractly.

What to watch

” It already requires creators to label AI-generated content and lets users reduce the amount of AI content in their feeds. Pinterest takes a similar approach, while Meta now adds an “AI info” label across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads when it detects AI-generated content.

“The same platforms that produced more content, faster, and at a lower cost, are now tweaking their algorithms to push that content back down, but none of these systems are precise enough,” explains Matt Navarra, social media consultant and author of the weekly Geekout Newsletter.