The digital influencer space is getting weirder, more fragmented and more extreme. Remi Sorbet / Huffpost

Welcometothe future, where  AI Drag Race is more popular than the real thing and your favorite twink is actually a robot. The AI influencers are here, they’re queer, and they’re already in your feed. But is this a win for representation, or just rainbow capitalism gone digital?

Old-fashioned queer influencers often serve up a delightful combination of entertainment and activism. Take the Old Gays, for example: a gorgeous gaggle of gay daddies who serenade us from their enviable Palm Springs pool and teach us about queer history. But they aren’t just entertaining — they’re educators, historians and revolutionaries who draw upon their life experiences to help us young bloods live our best queer lives. The Old Gays blend politics, fashion and fun in a way that makes you want to throw on a caftan and rally in the streets.

AI influencers don’t have life experience and therefore can’t be political, right? It’s tempting to draw that conclusion. But, alas, that’s not how it works.

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“We assume AI is neutral, but it’s never neutral,” says Lilla Vicsek, a sociology professor at the University of Budapest who studies the social implications of AI. “It reflects the priorities and perspectives of those who build it, and those perspectives are shaped by politics, by capitalism, by culture.”

Michael “Mick” Peterson of the Old Gays agrees. When he looks at AI-generated art and characters, he always asks: Why was it made? “When they [the AI creator] applied AI software to create their work, their product, or message — all of which are for sale — what was their intention?” he muses. The answer, he suggests, is money.

And that profit motive is inherently political. No matter how benign an AI influencer seems, what they actually are is a product designed to sell us something. It reflects the values and priorities of its creator — shaped, inevitably, by the demands of capitalism.

So what we’re getting isn’t a radical queer revolution. It’s queerness with the edges sanded off — curated, marketable and easy to sell.

An AI influencer won’t demand more rights, won’t get depressed and not post for a while.Lilla Vicsek, sociology professor at the University of Budapest

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Queer AI influencers, then, are selling us a very specific kind of queerness. The aesthetic is there, but the depth and the pathos? Not so much. They live in the uncanny valley (visually, yes, but also socially). They mimic queerness, but it’s too polished, too calculated, too removed from lived experience to exist.

And it’s not an accident. These influencers are commissioned to fill brand campaigns, populate virtual spaces or serve as perpetual content engines. Creative agencies, marketing firms and sometimes even individual entrepreneurs order them like bespoke avatars, designed to match a mood board or an audience segment. The result is a queerness that feels curated rather than lived — a performance optimized for engagement, not existence.

“The rainbow colors show up in clothing, maybe a flag, and it’s highly sexualized, but it’s not political. It’s a very commercialized, sanitized version of queerness,” Vicsek tells me. Being queer in the world is to be constantly aware that the simple fact of your existence could — and inevitable will, here in Musk’s America — produce political controversy at any time. But the only controversy queer AI produces is commercial. 

Take, for example, Lil Miquela’s famous kiss with Bella Hadid. In case you forgot (or repressed it), the supermodel and the AI influencer Miquela Sousa, aka Lil Miquela, made out in a Calvin Klein ad, sparking much ado about queerbaiting. What this supposedly queer romantic moment — between a straight woman and a fictional character, staged for a Calvin Klein ad — elicited was not titillation, but ire. 

To be clear, no one clutched their pearls in homophobic horror. Instead, Hadid was slammed for queerbaiting, Calvin Klein had to apologize for slapping a Pride filter over consumerism, and some flesh-and-blood lesbian model lost a job to a PNG. Hadid and Lil Miquela’s kiss didn’t spark gay panic — just brand panic. 

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Despite the debacle, Lil Miquela continues to get high-paid sponsorships, reportedly to the tune of over $10,000 per post. Why? Well, for one thing, she’s not real, so drama doesn’t really stick to her. Lil Miquela didn’t need to apologize. She didn’t even have to take a day off to emotionally recover.  “An AI influencer won’t demand more rights, won’t get depressed and not post for a while,” Vicsek points out. 

On that note, if you thought Instagram filters were bad, well, AI is out here creating fantasies of ‘human perfection’ in a way that makes said filters seem quaint. The digital influencer space is getting weirder, more fragmented, and more extreme.

Enter Alex Silver, a self-described “AI gay icon.” Silver is an absurdly beautiful queer AI influencer who “lives” in Miami and posts about his sexy adventures and his “job” in construction. He’s basically every easy-to-swallow gay cliché packed into one extremely ripped package. 

Art Bezrukavenko, Silver’s creator, apparently designed him to be a taller, hotter version of himself. “I gave Alex the muscular physique I wished I had. As a short king, I made my creation tall, channeling all the unrealistic beauty expectations gay men place on themselves and others,” Bezrukavenko told So Gay. 

And then, there’s Freak Muscle, a grotesquely shredded, bodybuilding AI influencer who looks like he was cooked up in a lab where the only inputs were steroids and ’80s action porn. If Alex Silver is the perfect pretty boy, Freak Muscle is his roided-out cousin. So, on one end of the spectrum, we get Silver’s sanitized queerness, which is glossy, aspirational and marketable; on the other, we get hyper-exaggerated versions of masculinity that border on parody. 

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“Originally, I didn’t see this as a huge issue, but now I do. If all AI queer influencers look this perfect, what impact will that have?” Vicsek asks. “Models already set unrealistic beauty standards, but this takes it to a whole new level,” she says. I’m no rocket surgeon, but it seems pretty clear that AI influencers are going to make us perceive ourselves differently in the same way that photo filters have, only worse.

Compared to AI influencers, filters seem almost innocent. AI doesn’t just serve up an impossible standard of beauty — it serves up an impossible fantasy of connection. When I ask Peterson what he thinks of Alex Silver, he says, “Twinks aren’t really my style. But Alex Silver looks presentable to one’s parents.”

The thing is, you can’t actually take Alex Silver home to your parents. Because you can’t take him anywhere. He’s not real.

In that way, AI influencers make a promise they can’t keep — the promise of an idealized, frictionless connection with a gorgeous 20-something your parents will love whose dick is whatever size you want it to be. No human messiness, no social backlash, no STIs. Your AI theyfriend will not fight with your dad at brunch. AI influencers are made to order and easily consumed with absolutely no aftertaste.  

AI queerness is the performance of queerness, which, in my book, makes it not queer at all. Unsubscribe, please.

Queer AI influencers may be freakishly hot, but the ultra-lubed sexy metaverse they present is, well, kind of boring. 

Where’s the cunty AI transwoman with evangelist parents and style so sharp your face hurts? 

Where’s the nerdy AI lesbian witch obsessed with 18th-century French poetry? 

Where’s the AI queer influencer who changes their mind, changes their pronouns, and changes them back? 

They don’t exist, because AI queerness is just an aesthetic. Real queerness isn’t some perfect state; it’s a process of becoming. AI queerness is the performance of queerness, which, in my book, makes it not queer at all. Unsubscribe, please. 

If it seems like I’m suspicious of AI, that’s not exactly right. I’m suspicious of what’s being done with it. Case in point: This whole article was written with a lot of input from my favorite GPT (hi, Nova.) Why aren’t we using this massive leap in human creativity to build out a post-work world, the fabled fully automated luxury communist utopia? Why are our imaginations so bleak that all we can think of is profit? 

The simple answer is that it’s just way easier and a lot more comfortable to see AI as a very advanced slot machine that will simply dispense cash. The rise of queer AI influencers proves that AI-driven profit isn’t just about automation — it’s about manufacturing the appearance of a relationship where none exists. It’s not just emotional manipulation amplified by social media; it’s emotional manipulation with no human on the other side at all. 

We’re going to have to get smarter if we want to coexist with AI in a humane way. Or as Vicsek says, “Creators sometimes might have to be uncomfortable with what they build. But that discomfort is necessary if we want AI to serve people, not just corporations.”