The End of the Influencer Era Is Really About This One Skill

Author

Shira Lazar
December 01, 2025

We all know we are spending too much time online. I have spent the last year talking to creators, analyzing platform behavior, and releasing the Creator Mental Health Report, and the pattern is always the same. People feel overwhelmed, exhausted, hyper-visible, and somehow more invisible at the same time.

So when I sat down with futurist and educator Sinead Bovell for this episode of The AI Download, I expected a conversation about AI jobs and technology trends. What I did not expect was a clear diagnosis of something much bigger. The old system that rewarded visibility at all costs is breaking. And AI is accelerating that shift in ways most people have not fully processed.

The influencer era was built on the idea that the more visible you are, the more valuable you become. Your life becomes content, your personality becomes a product, and your pace is dictated by algorithms. That system was already cracking under the weight of burnout, economic instability, and constant performance. Now AI has entered the room. Synthetic media, digital actors, cloned voices, algorithmic editing, automated content pipelines. The pressure to be “always on” meets a technology that never turns off.

AI is not replacing creators. It is replacing the workflows that made creators exhausted in the first place. And that shift exposes how fragile the visibility-based system always was.

Sinead explains this in a very grounded way. AI is not removing humans from the picture. It is removing the repetitive tasks that kept humans on autopilot. A recent McKinsey analysis estimates that currently demonstrated technologies could automate activities that represent up to 57 percent of U.S. work hours.

But the work that requires context, discernment, timing, ethics and lived experience is not going anywhere. That is the part no model can replace.

This is also the part that the influencer era ignored. It rewarded constant content creation, not human decision-making. It rewarded performance over depth. It rewarded speed over clarity.

No wonder creators are burning out. A recent Creator Mental Health Study found that 62 percent of creators feel burnout sometimes or often, and 66 percent feel stressed about content performance.
 

The system was unsustainable long before AI showed up. AI is simply exposing what was already broken.

One of the most important things Sinead talked about is how we are entering a post reality era. Reality still exists, but it now competes with synthetic versions of itself. AI-generated people. AI generated news. AI-generated content that blends seamlessly into our feeds.

Young people are already feeling this. Pew Research found that 48 percent of teens say social media has a mostly negative effect, especially those who are online almost constantly.

At the same time, another Pew study shows that Americans care deeply about knowing whether images, audio or text were created by humans or by AI, yet many feel unsure about their ability to tell the difference.

If there is one insight I took from Sinead, it is this. You do not need to outrun AI. You need to understand where your value sits in a world where intelligent systems are everywhere.

That is human judgment.
That is curation.
That is what cannot be automated.

The old era rewarded people who could be everywhere at once. The next era rewards people who have taste, authenticity, and those who avoid the noise. 

This is not the end of influence.
It is the end of autopilot.
And the beginning of something more intentional.

🎙️ Listen now and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

Other headlines to check out:

AI

Creator Economy

Gentle Reminder 🙏

“Do not seek familiarity, do not keep searching for your past in your future. Trust what comes.”
― Bianca Sparacino,

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