The 21-year-old influencer Natalia Novak appears to live a lavish lifestyle. The extremely buxom blonde model likes to hang out at the beach, go shopping, and pose for Instagram glamour shots with her friends. But there’s one glaring thing that sets her apart from most other influencers: she doesn’t actually exist. Natalia’s entire likeness is the product of an AI image generator, a figment of the imagination of a machine learning algorithm. As such, everything about her feels comically exaggerated for the male gaze — her figure impossibly curvaceous, her hair preposterously lustrous, her outfits ludicrously crisp and revealing — and yet she’s picking up tens of thousands of adoring fans on social. The folks behind virtual influencers like Novak, in other words, have fully embraced the advent of powerful generative AI tools to create entire feeds of attractive internet personalities — and surprisingly, perhaps, some are getting actual traction. We decided to talk to one of them, resulting in a fascinating chat with the creator of Natalia, a 20-something software systems engineer named Pierre. “I usually just call myself her manager,” he told us. “The reason for this is of course that I’m playing a character and people don’t want to know so directly who’s behind it, even if they could piece it together if they want to. Does that make sense?” We’ll let readers decide on that point. But what is clear is that Pierre is at the vanguard of something strange and new — and possibly, for good…We Interviewed a Guy Who's Using AI to Post as a Comically Voluptuous Influencer