This AI grandma has a million followers

Over the past four months, millions of people have been getting life advice from Granny Spills.

She's an influencer who wears all-pink designer suits and dishes out ruthless one-liners on TikTok and Instagram.

"Flowers die, honey. My Chanel bags are forever," she says in one video that was liked nearly a million times.

Granny Spills isn't real.

She's an AI creation, generated by two twenty-something content creators who hope to use her persona to get clicks and nab brand deals.

And honestly? I'm not sure how I feel about this yet.

Before this year, the technology wasn't quite ready for small or midlevel content creators to launch their own realistic characters without massive budgets.

That changed when AI video generation models like Google's Veo and OpenAI's Sora started getting really good.

And I mean really good - to the point where these synthetic people are virtually indistinguishable from real ones.

Eric Suerez, one of Granny Spills' creators, is a content creator who does street interviews for TikTok.

When Veo 3 was released this spring, he saw it as a direct threat to his livelihood.

"Because eventually, maybe brands would just be able to type one to two sentences and get a perfect video that we spend a lot of time producing in real life," he said.

So instead of trying to fight back against these deepfakes, he decided to front-run the competition and create his own AI influencers.

Smart, I suppose. But also slightly terrifying.

Suerez and his business partner Adam Vaserstein at Blur Studios now have a series of AI characters.

A Bigfoot character. A street interviewer. A fitness instructor. And their most successful project - Granny Spills, who garnered 400,000 followers on TikTok and 1 million followers on Instagram in her first few weeks of existence.

The workflow is genuinely impressive from a technical standpoint.

They train Anthropic's Claude on their past videos and ask it to create new concepts and scripts.

Then they fine-tune Claude's ideas and insert them into their prompt templates in Veo and other AI apps.

"Making one video can be 5-10 minutes, as opposed to going out and filming an entire video production, editing, and all that," Vaserstein says.

Which, look, I get the appeal.

These new influencers don't require salaries or wardrobe budgets. They can be "filmed" in locations anywhere around the world. They'll patiently record dozens of takes, of dozens of different concepts, and respond directly to thousands of fans.

But there's a reason this feels a bit off, isn't there?

The monetisation problem

While the videos have gone incredibly viral, monetisation is proving to be a challenge.

Suerez says their videos are getting flagged by TikTok as "unoriginal" and are de-monetised from the Creator Rewards Program.

Which is kind of darkly funny when you think about it - TikTok, the platform that's essentially automated virality, is now having to figure out how to handle content that's been automated one step further.

So Suerez is instead hoping to earn money from Facebook, YouTube, and Cameo, and to ink deals with brands that Granny can promote.

The goal is to "combine products and services of brands into those entertaining interviews or challenge-based content that we do in the streets, so it doesn't come across as an ad."

Which brings us to the bigger question: do we want this?

Why this feels wrong

Keith Bendes from Linqia, an influencer marketing agency, put it well:

"As a non-human, you obviously have not consumed the product or tried the service. So there is an inherent inauthenticity to the support of a brand."

His agency polled over 200 enterprise marketers and found that 89% of them were not planning to work with AI influencers, avatars, or digital clones in 2026.

Recent ads with AI characters have faced severe backlash. A Guess ad in Vogue with an AI model drew fierce criticism, as did the introduction of an AI actress, Tilly Norwood.

People are growing increasingly disenchanted with the amount of AI slop on social media, with some choosing to log off altogether.

And I think there's something fundamentally important about that resistance.

What makes creators work

The entire reason the creator economy works is because of connection.

Real, human connection.

People trust creators because they're people.

Because they've used the products they're recommending.

Because their flaws and quirks and genuine reactions create moments that feel authentic.

One article I read pointed out that:

"What's really great with AI content is that they're not embarrassed to say things that a normal human would typically feel uncomfortable putting out in the public”.

But that's exactly the problem, isn't it?

The lack of embarrassment, the lack of genuine stakes, the lack of actual human vulnerability - that's what makes it feel hollow.

Granny Spills can say outrageous things because there's no actual person behind her who has to live with the consequences. There's no reputation on the line. No real brand being built. Just a character that can be infinitely iterated and discarded if it stops performing.

Where this is probably heading

I'll be honest with you - I think we're heading towards a hybrid future whether we like it or not.

Actual influencers like Jake Paul have already given users of Sora permission to create videos in his likeness. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has done the same. The technology is only going to get better and cheaper.

Some creators will use AI to scale their output, to handle more engagement, to expand into markets and languages they couldn't reach before. And that might actually be useful.

But I really hope we don't lose sight of what made this whole thing valuable in the first place.

The creator economy matters because it's human.

Because it's messy and real and built on actual relationships between people who trust each other.

If we replace that with efficiently generated synthetic personalities that can crank out content in 5-10 minutes, we might gain scale.

But we'll lose the soul of the whole thing.

And personally, I think that's too high a price to pay.

If you want to read the article that inspired this newsletter, click here →

Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱

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