Lil Miquela, and Why She’s Actually as Real as All of Us
As a millennial I am, constantly scrolling through Instagram feed is my everyday routine. There’s nothing new, nothing exciting, not until I stumble upon lilmiquela account. At first, I thought she’s just another influencer with pretty neat wardrobe, but then I realized that she looks “fake”. She doesn’t look like an actual human being, and it confused me. Mainly because she posted few photos of her and her human friends and all her photos background look so real. With this confusion, I started to find out more about her. Mind you, that the first time I found her account, she wasn’t as big as now and there wasn’t much information about her.
The only credible source I found about her was an interview she did with Shane Dawson where she said she is real and she is really talking to him. The interesting part of the interview is when Shane ask whether she’s digitally enhancing her picture on Instagram and she said “Who doesn’t” when I heard that answer I concluded that maybe she’s just a project, created by some person to find out people’s reaction towards this kind of phenomena. Turns out, it is much bigger than that.
Up until now Miquela already has 1.1 million followers on Instagram and 21K subscribers on YouTube. Famous brands, such as Chanel, Kenzo, Supreme, and many more are her daily outfit. She’s also been in several magazines, and the latest is in Highsnobiety. And once in a while, she shows her concern on many social issues. Whether she’s real or not, her popularity is definitely real. Many people are still questioning her true form, but more people love her as herself.
Drama and fame are like peanut butter and jelly, so it wasn’t surprising at all when suddenly Miquela’s Instagram was hacked by some other robot girl named Bermuda and caused a pretty huge drama on Instagram. In a nutshell, this drama leads to Miquela finally admitted that she’s a robot and she was programmed by some company called brud, which apparently behinds all this drama. brud is a company whose main focus is using AI for media businesses and this is their way to introduce their new character.
If all these facts are confirmed, then what makes Miquela real? She has that quality that makes people relate to her story, to her life. She makes us feel that no matter how perfect she looks like, she’s still and only a “human”. She looks gorgeous, but people call her fake, she makes music and people say it was too heavily autotuned. It feels like everything she does will always have flaws and that makes her relatable. That makes her real in some way, she makes us feel, she makes us curious, she influences us, and isn’t that what really matters?
