AI-powered digital doubles of consumers’ favorite influencers may soon be promoting products on TikTok .
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TikTok announced Monday that it has added digital avatars, created with generative AI , to its offerings for branded content.
The Chinese technology company will offer stock avatars and custom avatars; the stock avatars have already been built and use real, paid actors’ digital likenesses.
According to TikTok, the stock avatars have already been licensed for commercial use. These avatars, the company said, “allow businesses of all sizes to add a human touch to their content with quick and accessible global creators from a diverse range of backgrounds, nationalities and over 30 languages.”
However, the platform is also enabling content creators on the app to authorize the development of custom avatars bearing their own likenesses. They can then use their digital likeness to promote brands’ products, the same way they might in real life. Similarly, brands can “build their own custom avatars with their brand IP, spokesperson or a partnered creator,” TikTok said. Like the stock avatars, TikTok has outfitted its technology with translation services for its custom avatars.
In a video TikTok posted in tandem with the announcement, a digital avatar of creator O’Neil Thomas—known on TikTok as @oneilthomas97—speaks in French to users. The avatar says, “I don’t actually speak French. But now, I can, thanks to Avatars.”
The real-life Thomas said in a statement that he expects the tool to help “scale [his] reach globally and [his] revenue exponentially.”
According to TikTok, all videos that use Symphony Digital Avatars will have an “AI-generated” marker on them to alert consumers that, while the avatar in the video may appear to be a creator they trust, the content has been generated with AI. That may be a nod to the EU AI Act , which, once fully enacted, will require companies to disclose when they have used AI to generate content.
Given that TikTok is already under scrutiny for potential violation of the EU Digital Services Act , it’s likely not looking to be at the center of any more technology trouble.
Based on that video, which does bear a small marker in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, it’s not clear whether TikTok will begin specifying what piece of the video has been created using AI.
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Stock avatars are already available in TikTok Symphony, the company’s generative AI suite for advertising and marketing. The company rolled out preliminary capabilities in May. According to the announcement, though, TikTok is still testing its custom avatars offering with creators on the platform.
Nearly 60 percent of TikTok users report being more likely to trust a brand if they learn about its products from TikTok creators, so these digital avatars may continue to form bonds between brands and consumers.
In addition to the digital avatar offerings, TikTok introduced its AI Dubbing tool Monday. The feature will allow creators and brands to translate videos into more than 10 languages, which it expects to resonate with a greater subset of users. The technology, TikTok said, can automatically detect a video’s original language, then transcribes and translates it to create a video with dubbing in creator or company’s language of choice.
TikTok’s announcements comes just a few months after U.S. legislators passed a bill that would ban U.S. app stores from allowing consumers to download it if its parent company, ByteDance, does not sell the video-creation app by spring 2025. TikTok has already clapped back and has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals to dismantle the legislation.
While the social media giant is not the first company to enable the digital recreation of a human’s physical qualities, it is an early mover where video is concerned. Other solutions, like Synthesia, which enable companies to create batched videos using AI avatars. In Synthesia’s case, that does include an offering to create a digital avatar based on one’s own face.
However, those avatars are meant to be talking-head style only; they are not equipped to handle full-body shots or product placements, as TikTok Symphony Digital Avatars seem to be expected to do.
And while image generation tools like AI.Fashion and Flock AI can create full-body digital likenesses of real-life models to help brands quickly generate product images, neither company has cracked hyper-realistic video yet.
TikTok did not respond to Sourcing Journal’s request for comment on the further specificities of the AI-generated avatars.
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