Ms Kittie has almost 100,000 followers on Instagram and rakes in more than £5,000 (around $6,200) per month, and appears on the surface to be a typical young content creater, even posing in pics with pals, hanging out by poolsides, showing her ‘try-on hauls’ and taking selfies in her bedroom.
However, hundreds of men might be heartbroken to learn Ms Kittie doesn’t actually exist in the flesh.
In actuality, she’s an online influencer made entirely by artificial intelligence and exists on the subscription platform, Fanvue.
This platform and others like it work similarly to websites or apps that allow users to chat to virtual humanoid companions.
The creator expects February 14 will be her busiest day of the year, with plans to work 18 hours with fans and ‘fixing lonely hearts’.
AI bots and ‘parasocial relationships’ have rocketed online, as the US entered what surgeon general Vivek Murthy described as a loneliness epidemic. Indeed, a Harvard survey found that 21 percent of adults reporting they had serious feelings of loneliness.
Murthy said a huge influx of Americans were reporting that they ‘felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant’, while the effects of social isolation impacting health and mortality in the same way as smoking cigarettes every day.
Fanvue say para-social relationships with digital creators will become more and more common as people turn to the digital world for compansionship.
A Fanvue spokesperson added: “AI Influencers are able to build massive fanbases online, sharing their lives and journey through content – just like a human influencer would.
“Our chat service, which is available to all creators on our platform, is incredibly popular and we’re expecting a massive spike in user traffic as singletons choose to spend their Valentine’s online, rather than on a real world date.”
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