AI ethics on Monday, 13 June 2022

Digitally created online celebrities (so-called virtual influencers) have appeared on various social media and video streaming platforms. While the scientific community has recently started to take an interest in this new phenomenon, it still remains mostly unclear how online audiences engage with—and relate to—these artificial digital creations. To address the identified research gap, we conducted a preregistered experiment ( N = 179), comparing viewers’ parasocial interactions (PSIs) with eith