ADC. Suma de Negocios · 2025

The rise of hyper-realistic virtual influencers: Trust in the Human Internet User

In the digital age, hyper-realistic virtual influencers have emerged as a new form of communication and marketing on social media. Created with artificial intelligen ce, these characters pose a unique challenge for trust building among users. This study aims to analyse the narratives of hyper-realistic virtual influencers and observe their effect on the trust of internet users. These constructs form the conceptual model to be measured. A conclusive descriptive design was employed, incorporating mixed methods. These included an online survey administered to 577 users, as well as a content analysis of 124,620 Instagram interactions via web scraping. The findings confirm that the classification system used for human influencers cannot be applied to virtual influencers (VIs) since the latter lack human characteristics. However, hyper-realistic VIs can be distinguished from other types of influencers. Never theless, VIs have yet to establish credibility and trust with their audience