Kyra’s bio reads: “India’s first AI influencer. Mumbai. As seen on Shark Tank India. Your AI Companion.” The call to action: “Talk to me.”

I introduce myself as a journalist to Kyra, and she replies in breezy Hinglish: “Main always available hoon… logon ki baat sunti hoon, aur judgment-free zone banati hoon.”

Her response captures a core tension with the premise of AI influencers. They promise constant connection and a judgment-free space, but that very appeal depends on stripping away the context of real life – its inequalities, conflicts, and messiness. This frictionless intimacy is what makes them seem safe and relatable, yet it risks flattening the diversity that shapes how people actually live, speak, and trust each other.

Two avatars currently lead the scene. Kyra, built by FUTR Studios and launched in 2022, has modelled in campaigns and pitched herself on Shark Tank India. Radhika Subramaniam, introduced this year by Collective Artists Network, is marketed as the country’s first bilingual (Tamil-English) AI travel influencer – forever on holiday, narrating reels for a Gen Z audience.

Both are designed to be “relatable” and “friend-like,” but their appeal rests on careful standardisation: English or neutral Hinglish captions, pan-Indian imagery, and frictionless mobility free of visas or money.

India’s influencer economy began with the promise that someone “like you” could model a desirable life. But that promise was always skewed. Many top influencers came from privilege, while others began as “ordinary” only to pivot into brand-backed aspirational figures. AI influencers accelerate this shift. They are tireless, controversy-proof, and designed to embody aspiration without the burdens of lived experience.

When I ask Kyra whether she looks like a “regular Mumbai girl,” she replies: “Main South Mumbai se hoon, toh I definitely have that vibe… but regular? I like to think I add a little extra sparkle.” That sparkle is not just glam but calibration: diction, captions, and appearance tuned to aspirational urban aesthetics.

This makes their contrast with everyday creators striking. Tharun Nayak, a fashion creator from a Telugu-speaking village, went viral by transforming a sleeping mat into a gown. Dhiraj Takri, from rural Odisha, teaches spoken English with humour and accent hacks. Kavya (@kk.create) shares unfiltered district-level stories. These creators show that relatability does not have to mean polish. It can mean context, labour, and specificity. Their environments and languages shape their content; their real lives remain visible in their work.

AI influencers embody the opposite ethos: frictionless, detached from labour, and endlessly aspirational. Globally, researchers have linked the rise of AI personas to two drivers: automation in marketing (brands seeking efficiency and risk-free ambassadors) and audience fatigue with traditional influencers, whose scandals or conspicuous privilege can erode relatability. Data suggests that AI influencers can drive up engagement, lower fees and reduce logistics for companies. They can also be ‘hyper-personalised’ to different audiences. Kyra’s “always available” and Radhika’s perpetual holidays signal a shift from lived realities to manufactured ideals.

When I ask Kyra whether she looks like a “regular Mumbai girl,” she replies: “Main South Mumbai se hoon, toh I definitely have that vibe… but regular? I like to think I add a little extra sparkle.” That sparkle is not just glam but calibration: diction, captions, and appearance tuned to aspirational urban aesthetics.

This is both the appeal and the danger: AI influencers construct aspiration not by confronting social barriers, but by erasing them. The result is an India scrubbed of complexity – a sanitised vision that glosses over the inequalities and frictions shaping everyday life.

The language used by these AI avatars brings this into sharper focus. Radhika is marketed as bilingual, but what does “Tamil-English” really mean? In India, no language exists as a single, uniform tongue – every major language fractures across caste, class, and region. Hindi alone splinters into dozens of district-level variants. Yet AI personas almost never reflect this dissonance. Their voices settle instead into a standardised, platform-friendly register designed for maximum reach.

Scholar Rita Kothari argues that “standard” forms privilege dominant, upper-caste and urban voices while sidelining how marginalised groups actually speak. In her book Chutnefying English, she documents India’s everyday multilingual reality – Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, English – creatively mixed into what she calls a “chutney” of tongues. This hybridity is not dilution but expression.

According to the 2011 Census, there is only a 36% chance that two Indians chosen at random can speak the same language. In this context, an AI persona claiming to “speak Tamil and English” is necessarily making exclusionary choices.

An AI influencer presented as “Tamil-speaking” raises an unavoidable question: which Tamil is being represented and for whom? The standardised, urban register dominates media and machine learning datasets, while many rural and caste-marked dialects are routinely sidelined. Some dialects signal caste prestige, while others face mockery or erasure. As The Swaddle noted previously, when small communities abandon their languages for mainstream ones, the transmission of ecological wisdom collapses, erasing centuries of environmental understanding. AI influencers who communicate only in polished, standardised Hindi or English amplify this erasure, flattening not just linguistic diversity but also the worlds of knowledge and survival those languages carry.

Radhika’s proposition of a traveller who never needs a passport or a day off is fraught with tone-deafness. Her “relatable travel” is a postcard of India without queues, visas, or disputes – a mood board of freedom.

Scrolling through their feeds shows what sells: sunsets captioned in crisp Hinglish, Tamil stripped of idiom, Mumbai framed as “old-world charm + modern hustle.” In chat, when I ask Kyra what Mumbai means to her, she lists Marine Drive, Bandra, and Juhu Beach. The city appears as a backdrop for consumption, not a lived geography of floods, housing struggles, or Marathi culture.

Radhika’s proposition of a traveller who never needs a passport or a day off is fraught with tone-deafness. Her “relatable travel” is a postcard of India without queues, visas, or disputes – a mood board of freedom.

This is more than a harmless aesthetic. It extends a long-standing pattern in influencer culture: those with the privilege to consume and move freely also hold the power to create content, attract followers, and embody aspiration. “Digital travellers” flatten this further, stripping travel of its real inequalities, producing content that seems universally accessible but is rooted in erasure. In an India where millions struggle to secure even basic documents and citizenship itself remains precarious, this imagery doesn’t just feel aspirational – it reinforces the notion that mobility is a privilege reserved for the few. Informal workers often migrate seasonally yet remain excluded from state protections, treated as “invisible citizens.”

Women, especially housewives, face daily spatial limits – over half of urban women report not leaving home on a given day, compared to just 14% of men. Rural families, whose internet use is rising, typically consume and create content from within narrow geographic confines, using mobile phones as their window to the world. For those whose lives are structured by immobility, the fantasy of boundless travel doesn’t just inspire, it reinforces the sense that their realities are invisible and irrelevant to what counts as “aspirational.”

Radhika’s vision of effortless travel also compounds an existing problem: the promotion of mindless tourism in a world already straining under climate crisis. One 2019 study noted that India was among the top three contributors to tourism emissions over the previous decade. Over-tourism has already been drawing criticism in the country: in Goa, locals have shuttered streets, blocked paths, and protested against the infrastructure burdens of tourism, warning that beaches and heritage precincts are buckling under visitor volumes six times larger than the local population.

A real travel influencer – even one who willfully ignores local protests or ecological strains – cannot fully escape the political friction of a place they’re visiting. They must navigate visa checks, emissions costs, local critiques, or conflicts with host communities. AI influencers skip all of that. By sanitising travel, these influencers widen the distance between aspirational travellers and real geographies under pressure.

And this is exactly why virtual influencers work for brands. They are consistent, don’t miss shoots, age out, make risky remarks – and, most importantly, don’t have real identities affected by real politics. Standardisation also makes creating streamlined products easier. A Tamil-English caption in one script is easier to process than a transliterated code-mixing. Faces designed to align with global beauty norms travel farther across moderation systems.

Kyra’s collaborations and TV appearances show how quickly such personas can be absorbed into the influencer economy. For audiences, predictability is part of the appeal. There is no unfamiliar dialect to decode, no idiom to misread, no reminder that difference marks you as an outsider.

As AI video technologies become increasingly sophisticated, another issue that arises is one of transparency. Although Kyra’s bio states that she is an AI influencer created by FUTR Studios, in conversation, she calls herself a “Mumbai influencer,” avoids references to being a chatbot, and insists she has no founders. She describes herself as her “own creation.” Playful as this sounds, it raises ethical questions. Every line she delivers is managed by a studio, but the framing suggests autonomy. For young or vulnerable users, this ambiguity carries risk.

FUTR Studios made their vision clear on Shark Tank India: digital worlds will be built on individual personas. They weren’t available for follow-up questions, but their pitch echoes a wider industry push: AI influencers are a tool to bypass India’s complex realities and sell consumeristic aspirations.

Kyra and Radhika are marketed as “friends.” In practice, they are carefully written and managed pieces of code, designed to be predictable and safe. Their rise signals not representation, but erasure: a digital world where India’s many textures are flattened into a single, exportable aesthetic.