Clarissa Mansbridge spent nearly two decades building an entertainment career behind the scenes, working with the likes of Jason DeRulo and Shengo Deane, Kim Kardashian’s former bodyguard, but she rarely appeared at public events. She liked the thrill of it: building someone’s brand, swerving crises, and dealing with day-to-day challenges.
Then, three years ago, her life was upended when her son was born without a heartbeat at 33 weeks. Doctors managed to resuscitate him, but the months in intensive care brought scare after scare, with no certainty that he would survive.
When, eventually, miraculously, they made it home, Mansbridge, who lives in Brisbane, Australia, knew her work life would have to change due to complications related to her son’s recovery. She began experimenting with AI image-generation tools and built the “humbly wealthy, wholesome” influencer and model Mia Metaverse. A fan of early Sims, she reveled in crafting storylines and glamorous settings for Mia to move through.
Mansbridge, 34, says she now earns around $6,000 a month through brand collaborations and designing bespoke AI influencers for brands, many of which require her to sign an NDA so she can’t disclose which ones she’s worked for. Yet despite this being her most profitable year since launching, Mansbridge and other AI creators worry that global changes to how AI content is handled on social platforms could upend their business model.
Since the emergence of generative AI and text-to-image tools in 2022, creators have built lucrative accounts around virtual personalities that are more affordable, scalable, and brand-safe. Estimated to be worth $14.5 billion, the virtual influencer market is projected to reach $110.4 billion by 2033, with a reported 33.6 percent annual growth rate. Brands are firmly on board: Research by the social agency Billion Dollar Boy found that 79 percent of marketers are increasing their investment in AI-generated creator content.
But as regulation converges on this burgeoning creator industry, the tide may be turning. From August 2, new rules under the EU Artificial Intelligence Act require AI-generated or -manipulated promotional content to be clearly labeled, while platforms like TikTok are tightening detection systems and reshaping feeds to elevate human creators over synthetic spam. For people whose livelihoods depend on AI influence, the risk is a regulatory maze, with no clear road map to navigate it.
The EU AI Act is the first-ever comprehensive legal framework on AI—a “global first,” as European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen called it—and aims to foster “trustworthy AI” in Europe. Under Article 50 of the act, providers and deployers of AI systems must disclose when audio, image, video, or text content has been artificially generated or manipulated. But “where the content forms part of an evidently artistic, creative, satirical, fictional, or analogous work,” the transparency obligations are limited to disclosure that doesn’t hamper the display or enjoyment of the work. That leaves plenty of room for interpretation—and confusion.
Kai Zenner, digital policy adviser to Axel Voss, a member of Parliament and a negotiator on the Act, says it was drafted too early, too abstractly. “ChatGPT had only just come out, and there was scant knowledge among MEPs and parliamentarians about what we were regulating for,” he explains. “The driver was simply: AI is here and more AI-generated content is coming, so let’s raise the AI literacy of EU citizens [by implementing the labeling clause].”
More legislation is likely to add to the uncertainty. “There are several revisions coming later this year and next that will force influencers not only to label their content, but provide transparency on where they come from, what they want to do, and how they are financed,” explains Zenner. “It’s still really unclear how that will be managed, since all we have to go on is Article 50.”
