Virtual influencers are playing a significant role in advertising Chinese AI (artificial intelligence) technologies to sports fans, athletes, and the general public on a global scale at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.

While Eileen Gu, the American-born Chinese freeskier, was busy winning China’s third gold medal of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in the women’s freeski big air final, her digital doppelganger “Meet Gu” was hosting a live broadcasting of the contest in an event sponsored by Migu video, a China Mobile subsidiary that provides video services and digital content products.

In the live session, the virtual human “Meet Gu” did a professional commentary on Eileen Gu’s performance, as she pulled off a four-and-a-half rotation, 1620-degree jump, that scored a 94.50, knocking her fierce competition off the first place.

Aside from “Meet Gu”, who serves as a brand ambassador and helps her human counterpart manage commercial activities, China Mobile’s Migu video has introduced four other AI clones to represent human athletes, take interviewing requests from media and make TV appearances.

Another AI influencer is Luo Tianyi, an animated girl with a heart-shaped face and oversized eyes, who sang “Time to shine”, a song in Mandarin Chinese specially created for the Winter Olympic Games, at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics Cultural Festival, held in Beijing on February 2nd.

She was the first virtual star to do a solo performance on the Olympic stage, marking the big moment that shows virtual idols’ increasing role in the advertising of Chinese pop culture and technologies to a global audience. With the help of 3D modeling and motion capture technology, every movement and facial expression of Luo Tianyi was well defined.

Luo Tianyi was officially launched in 2012 by the Shanghai-based Henian Information Technology Corporation, featuring the voice synthesizer software VOCALOID developed by Japanese Yamaha Corporation. She is first Vocaloid Mandarin Chinese virtual character and has a voice adapted from the one of Chinese voice actress Shan Xin. The 15-year-old singer quickly amassed a huge fan base since her debut in 2012. Nowadays, Luo has more than five million fans on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo.

Most companies choose to increase their brand presence by partnering with celebrities, who showcase their latest products in marketing campaign events. Nowadays, they can choose to save a big part of their marketing budgets and efforts instead, by taking advantage of the AI idols, who can live-stream and offer their viewers a highly immersive viewing experience, as well as provide high performance efficiency. For instance, Luo Tianyi is a brand ambassador for Pizza Hut while she does promotional work for local make-up brand Pechoin, beverage brand Nestlé and fast food chain KFC as well.

Virtual humans have gained a massive popularity in China over the past few years, bringing in record traffic and revenue, and giving human influencers a run for their money. According to Newsijie, China’s virtual idol industry was worth less than 100 million yuan (USD15.5 million) in 2018, but backed by increasing investments and institutional adoptions, it is expected to grow to as much as 15 billion yuan by 2023. Chinese consultancy organization iiMedia has estimated that the virtual idol market in China will reach a value of 6.22 billion yuan in 2021.

Making their way from singers to athlete replicas, virtual humans are sprawling beyond their idol roles, as sports fans are witnessing more use cases for the technology during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has utilized virtual humans in a bid to enhance its shopping and live-streaming events.

Alibaba DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group’s global research initiative, has launched a “virtual influencer” named Dong Dong for the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Dong Dong, a 22-year-old AI woman with a passion for winter sports, exists on the basis of cloud technology, and her personality was developed by DAMO Academy.

The virtual influencer can be found on Alibaba’s Taobao shopping app, where she promotes Olympic merchandise which is available in the official Olympic shop on Tmall, an Alibaba e-commerce marketing site, during her live-streaming shows. Dong Dong also works as a reporter, performing live talk shows where she presents fun Olympic games stories to sports fans with her natural human voice and lovely facial expressions.

This is not the first time that Alibaba has leveraged virtual humans to try improve user interaction.

In 2019, Tmall Luxury Pavilion, Alibaba’s e-commerce platform for luxury brands, partnered with virtual influencer Noonoouri in a game, where users could follow the virtual human’s adventures around the globe and earn points by interacting with her. Later on, Alibaba launched their own virtual influencer Aimèe, who interacts with consumers in a new and engaging way.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash