As AI possibilities become more sophisticated and continue to ripple throughout the creator economy, Collabstr’s “2025 Influencer Marketing Report” offers a sobering reality check based on extensive first-party data. Drawing from information provided by 40,000 advertisers and 100,000 creators collected between January and December 2024, the findings reveal that despite technological advancements, market behavior continues to prioritize human connection and trust.
AI Influencer Retreat
The most revealing insight from Collabstr’s analysis shows a significant drop in brand interest for AI-generated influencer content. According to Kyle Dulay, co-founder of Collabstr, brand openness to AI influencers decreased by approximately 30% between late 2024 and early 2025.
“Most brands were open to allowing AI influencers to come into their campaigns and apply, and they were open to working with them,” Kyle says, referencing data collected through Q4 2024. “This dropped by around 30% when it came to our most recent data set – which was sort of collected through the beginning of 2025 until now.”
This retreat comes despite growing AI sophistication, pointing to a core market reality that technology has yet to overcome: genuine audience trust.
“A lot of these accounts have the followings – there are accounts that have millions of followers and they’re fully AI – but they don’t have the loyalty that a real person has,” Kyle observes. “I think brands are catching on to that. And so the initial novelty is worn off.”
Platform Analysis: Where Brands Are Actually Spending
According to Kyle, traditional platforms with human creators continue to dominate the marketing field, while influencer marketing spend “is growing at a very strong pace” across established channels.
He emphasizes that despite technological advancements, brands still prioritize getting in front of the right audiences through human influencers: “The world’s getting noisy and people want to break through that. Influencers are well-positioned to bring brands, their products, and services to the right audiences. And that’s going to continue to happen. AI or not.”
UGC Growth Signals Trust Premium
While AI-generated content struggles with trust barriers, Collabstr’s research shows significant growth in user-generated content (UGC). According to Kyle, “UGC is experiencing explosive growth” with the number of creators offering UGC services nearly doubling year-over-year.
“UGC has become a very core part of the marketing strategy for a lot of these businesses,” Kyle notes. “Brands are looking beyond just getting a TikTok post or an Instagram post. They want to use it in their ads, whether that be their Meta ads, Snapchat ads, or any other platform they might use. They want to use it on their landing pages. They want to show people that real people are using their products or their service.”
The UGC surge directly counters the narrative that AI-generated content will conquer marketing. Kyle explains that this trend reflects a key shift in how brands approach content strategy: “I think this is a great thing. If you’re a business in the influencer marketing industry, this is only giving you a bigger advantage because influencer marketing spend is going to continue to grow.”
Gender Economics
The report’s findings on gender economics offer useful context for understanding how market forces operate in the creator economy. According to the report, male influencers earn approximately 40% more than their female counterparts on average – about $83 per collaboration at the micro-influencer level.
Kyle attributes this primarily to supply and demand dynamics. “Females are so much more inclined to become influencers based on our data. They totally dominate the micro-influencer category of influencers,” he explains. “This almost works against them in a way, because it normalizes pricing so much, whereas males are very hard to find.”
This market-driven analysis clarifies why trust carries such premium value; when competition is fierce, human connection becomes a critical differentiator. This same dynamic explains why fully synthetic AI influencers face significant barriers to adoption despite their technical sophistication.
Where AI Actually Delivers Value
Despite market hesitation around fully AI-generated influencer content, Kyle sees specific areas where AI tools are gaining traction in the creator economy, primarily in enhancing human workflows rather than replacing creators entirely.
“I think it’s very useful in terms of workflow,” Kyle explains. “If your career is being a creator, then I think that it’s very useful for you to use AI to ultimately speed up and improve the efficiency of your workflow.”
For research-focused content creators in niches such as finance or recipe development, tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity can significantly reduce background work. Content repurposing represents another growth area, with AI tools transforming long-form videos into platform-specific short clips.
“I know there are tools that ultimately allow you to clip up your content using AI,” Kyle says. “You can dump a long-form piece of content in there, and it will generate a bunch of short videos for you that you can distribute across your platform.”
Kyle also mentioned that AI could streamline the process of matching brands with appropriate influencers: “We’re doing a little bit of work with this at Collabster right now. I think you can say this for any marketplace, that this is a possibility moving forward. I think a lot of companies are working on this right now, and I think it’s going to be the future of the way that we do matching in marketplaces.”
The Faceless Content Middle Ground
Kyle highlights an interesting middle territory where AI content is gaining traction: faceless thematic content. Unlike synthetic human influencers, this category – where no presenter appears on screen – faces fewer trust barriers, as engagement centers on the value of information rather than personal connection.
“There’s a lot of pages out there where people post faceless content about cars and food,” Kyle explains. “Imagine you can generate a whole recipe video without having to actually go into your kitchen and do the recipe. If you can make that content where it’s indistinguishable from real content, people are going to watch it.”
Kyle’s personal experiences support this distinction: “I’ve caught myself on YouTube or Instagram watching and fully immersed in a video that I come to find out is fully AI-generated. I watched a whole documentary the other day about Inuits and how they avoid polar bears in the Arctic. It was so well done. I watched the whole video, and then I got a bit skeptical because one or two words were pronounced in a weird way.”
Breaking Through Digital Noise
Influencer marketing continues to grow as digital channels become increasingly filled with content. According to Kyle, this expansion occurs despite – and perhaps because of – the proliferation of content across various platforms.
“The world is getting increasingly noisier. There’s more content than ever being pushed out there, whether it be through video, photo, or text,” Kyle says. “This is a great thing. If you’re a business in the influencer marketing industry, this will only give you a bigger advantage, as influencer marketing spend is expected to continue growing. Brands are going to want to break through that noise.”
For human creators handling this environment, Kyle emphasizes basics that AI struggles to replicate: “I think that it’s important to niche down. I think it’s essential to focus on a core interest or two rather than trying to be everything at once. I think it’s important to be true to yourself, to think long-term about your brand rather than trying to get viral every single day with the newest trend.”
The Future: Human-AI Collaboration
Despite current market resistance to fully synthetic influencers, Kyle takes a contrarian position about their long-term prospects.
“I think my bold prediction would probably be that AI influencers are not going to be a fad,” he says. “I think that AI is going to play an increasing role in content creation. I think that AI influencers or AI content is going to – it’s going to ultimately carve out a piece of the market – and become very important, more important than we think.”
This perspective doesn’t contradict the current trust advantage that human creators enjoy, but rather suggests that technology will continue to improve to address its limitations. “As the technology matures and people are able to create content more and more that is pretty much indistinguishable from real content, you’ll start to see people watching and consuming this content without even knowing it’s AI.”
The market patterns revealed in Collabstr’s research suggest a future where AI enhances rather than replaces human creators.
For Kyle, who founded Collabstr in 2019, the data tells a story of technology complementing rather than replacing human connection. While AI tools will continue to change creator workflows and expand content possibilities, the market continues to place high value on the trust that only human creators can fully deliver.
David Adler is an entrepreneur and freelance blog post writer who enjoys writing about business, entrepreneurship, travel and the influencer marketing space.
As AI possibilities become more sophisticated and continue to ripple throughout the creator economy, Collabstr’s “2025 Influencer Marketing Report” offers a sobering reality check based on extensive first-party data. Drawing from information provided by 40,000 advertisers and 100,000 creators collected between January and December 2024, the findings reveal that despite technological advancements, market behavior continues to prioritize human connection and trust.
AI Influencer Retreat
The most revealing insight from Collabstr’s analysis shows a significant drop in brand interest for AI-generated influencer content. According to Kyle Dulay, co-founder of Collabstr, brand openness to AI influencers decreased by approximately 30% between late 2024 and early 2025.
“Most brands were open to allowing AI influencers to come into their campaigns and apply, and they were open to working with them,” Kyle says, referencing data collected through Q4 2024. “This dropped by around 30% when it came to our most recent data set – which was sort of collected through the beginning of 2025 until now.”
This retreat comes despite growing AI sophistication, pointing to a core market reality that technology has yet to overcome: genuine audience trust.
“A lot of these accounts have the followings – there are accounts that have millions of followers and they’re fully AI – but they don’t have the loyalty that a real person has,” Kyle observes. “I think brands are catching on to that. And so the initial novelty is worn off.”
Platform Analysis: Where Brands Are Actually Spending
According to Kyle, traditional platforms with human creators continue to dominate the marketing field, while influencer marketing spend “is growing at a very strong pace” across established channels.
He emphasizes that despite technological advancements, brands still prioritize getting in front of the right audiences through human influencers: “The world’s getting noisy and people want to break through that. Influencers are well-positioned to bring brands, their products, and services to the right audiences. And that’s going to continue to happen. AI or not.”
UGC Growth Signals Trust Premium
While AI-generated content struggles with trust barriers, Collabstr’s research shows significant growth in user-generated content (UGC). According to Kyle, “UGC is experiencing explosive growth” with the number of creators offering UGC services nearly doubling year-over-year.
“UGC has become a very core part of the marketing strategy for a lot of these businesses,” Kyle notes. “Brands are looking beyond just getting a TikTok post or an Instagram post. They want to use it in their ads, whether that be their Meta ads, Snapchat ads, or any other platform they might use. They want to use it on their landing pages. They want to show people that real people are using their products or their service.”
The UGC surge directly counters the narrative that AI-generated content will conquer marketing. Kyle explains that this trend reflects a key shift in how brands approach content strategy: “I think this is a great thing. If you’re a business in the influencer marketing industry, this is only giving you a bigger advantage because influencer marketing spend is going to continue to grow.”
Gender Economics
The report’s findings on gender economics offer useful context for understanding how market forces operate in the creator economy. According to the report, male influencers earn approximately 40% more than their female counterparts on average – about $83 per collaboration at the micro-influencer level.
Kyle attributes this primarily to supply and demand dynamics. “Females are so much more inclined to become influencers based on our data. They totally dominate the micro-influencer category of influencers,” he explains. “This almost works against them in a way, because it normalizes pricing so much, whereas males are very hard to find.”
This market-driven analysis clarifies why trust carries such premium value; when competition is fierce, human connection becomes a critical differentiator. This same dynamic explains why fully synthetic AI influencers face significant barriers to adoption despite their technical sophistication.
Where AI Actually Delivers Value
Despite market hesitation around fully AI-generated influencer content, Kyle sees specific areas where AI tools are gaining traction in the creator economy, primarily in enhancing human workflows rather than replacing creators entirely.
“I think it’s very useful in terms of workflow,” Kyle explains. “If your career is being a creator, then I think that it’s very useful for you to use AI to ultimately speed up and improve the efficiency of your workflow.”
For research-focused content creators in niches such as finance or recipe development, tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity can significantly reduce background work. Content repurposing represents another growth area, with AI tools transforming long-form videos into platform-specific short clips.
“I know there are tools that ultimately allow you to clip up your content using AI,” Kyle says. “You can dump a long-form piece of content in there, and it will generate a bunch of short videos for you that you can distribute across your platform.”
Kyle also mentioned that AI could streamline the process of matching brands with appropriate influencers: “We’re doing a little bit of work with this at Collabster right now. I think you can say this for any marketplace, that this is a possibility moving forward. I think a lot of companies are working on this right now, and I think it’s going to be the future of the way that we do matching in marketplaces.”
The Faceless Content Middle Ground
Kyle highlights an interesting middle territory where AI content is gaining traction: faceless thematic content. Unlike synthetic human influencers, this category – where no presenter appears on screen – faces fewer trust barriers, as engagement centers on the value of information rather than personal connection.
“There’s a lot of pages out there where people post faceless content about cars and food,” Kyle explains. “Imagine you can generate a whole recipe video without having to actually go into your kitchen and do the recipe. If you can make that content where it’s indistinguishable from real content, people are going to watch it.”
Kyle’s personal experiences support this distinction: “I’ve caught myself on YouTube or Instagram watching and fully immersed in a video that I come to find out is fully AI-generated. I watched a whole documentary the other day about Inuits and how they avoid polar bears in the Arctic. It was so well done. I watched the whole video, and then I got a bit skeptical because one or two words were pronounced in a weird way.”
Breaking Through Digital Noise
Influencer marketing continues to grow as digital channels become increasingly filled with content. According to Kyle, this expansion occurs despite – and perhaps because of – the proliferation of content across various platforms.
“The world is getting increasingly noisier. There’s more content than ever being pushed out there, whether it be through video, photo, or text,” Kyle says. “This is a great thing. If you’re a business in the influencer marketing industry, this will only give you a bigger advantage, as influencer marketing spend is expected to continue growing. Brands are going to want to break through that noise.”
For human creators handling this environment, Kyle emphasizes basics that AI struggles to replicate: “I think that it’s important to niche down. I think it’s essential to focus on a core interest or two rather than trying to be everything at once. I think it’s important to be true to yourself, to think long-term about your brand rather than trying to get viral every single day with the newest trend.”
The Future: Human-AI Collaboration
Despite current market resistance to fully synthetic influencers, Kyle takes a contrarian position about their long-term prospects.
“I think my bold prediction would probably be that AI influencers are not going to be a fad,” he says. “I think that AI is going to play an increasing role in content creation. I think that AI influencers or AI content is going to – it’s going to ultimately carve out a piece of the market – and become very important, more important than we think.”
This perspective doesn’t contradict the current trust advantage that human creators enjoy, but rather suggests that technology will continue to improve to address its limitations. “As the technology matures and people are able to create content more and more that is pretty much indistinguishable from real content, you’ll start to see people watching and consuming this content without even knowing it’s AI.”
The market patterns revealed in Collabstr’s research suggest a future where AI enhances rather than replaces human creators.
For Kyle, who founded Collabstr in 2019, the data tells a story of technology complementing rather than replacing human connection. While AI tools will continue to change creator workflows and expand content possibilities, the market continues to place high value on the trust that only human creators can fully deliver.