The influencer world just tilted. Here's what media agencies are doing about it

A few weeks ago a creator I follow posted a clip. Looked slick. Tight edits, clean captions, a background that shouldn't have been possible in his tiny apartment. I assumed he'd hired an editor.

He hadn't. He'd spent an afternoon with ChatGPT, Descript, and Photoshop's generative fill.

I bring this up because something has quietly shifted in influencer marketing, and the agencies that sit between brands and creators are now scrambling to figure out what it means for them.

Let me put a number on it.

Billion Dollar Boy, an influencer agency, ran a study this year. They talked to 4,000 consumers, 1,000 creators, and 1,000 senior marketing decision makers across the U.S. and U.K. The headline finding: 92% of marketers have already commissioned creator content that's fully or partly built with generative AI.

92%. Read that twice.

And it's not just marketers pushing it. 91% of creators say they use generative AI at least once a week. This isn't a fringe experiment anymore. It's the default workflow.

Wait. Do people actually prefer the AI stuff?

This is the part that surprised me.

60% of consumers in that study said they prefer generative AI content over traditional creator content. And 81% of creators reported better engagement on their AI-assisted posts compared to the ones made without any AI.

My first reaction was: really? People prefer the machine-touched version?

But sit with it for a second and it makes sense. A creator using AI can move faster, iterate more, tailor a piece to a specific audience without burning a week on it. The output lands closer to what that audience actually wants to see. Mike Nellis, who founded the AI content platform Quiller.ai, put it plainly: the tech lets creators develop content that's more personalized and more relevant, at speed. Of course it converts better.

Faster and sharper. That combination is hard to beat.

70% of marketers said their spend on AI-assisted creator content has gone up in the past 12 months. Money follows what works.

So is traditional creator content dead?

No. And this is the more interesting half of the story.

Becky Owen, the global CMO at Billion Dollar Boy, makes a distinction I think is worth holding onto. AI content, she says, is good at cutting through noise. Traditional content, the kind where a creator shares their actual skill or life or personality, adds depth. Her takeaway after running campaigns with both: the impact lives in the mix.

John Geletka, who runs Geletka+, agrees. Right now he calls AI content an "untapped asset," not a threat to what creators have always done.

That resonates with me. Think about it this way. AI is great at the surface, at speed, at volume. It's lousy at soul. A creator's real life, their actual voice, the thing that made you follow them in the first place, that doesn't come out of a prompt. The smart play is knowing which tool for which job.

What agencies actually need to do

This is the part most articles gloss over. The interesting question isn't "is AI content happening." It is. The interesting question is what a media agency is supposed to do about it.

Amanda Ferrante, chief growth officer at Code3, makes a point I wish more people heard. Not all generative AI content is the same thing. When a creator says "I use AI," that could mean anything from slapping a filter on a selfie to generating an entire concept from scratch.

"It's tempting to think creators are pushing a button and getting a new video," she told me. The reality is quieter. ChatGPT for script outlines. Auto-captioning. Descript to edit video off a transcript. Generative fill to add something to a background. Useful, sure. But still heavy on human input.

Which is exactly why agencies can't just wave this through. Ferrante's advice to her teams: understand how each influencer partner is actually using AI in their process, because the generation still needs real editing and review. Discuss the AI usage up front. Put it in the contract before you engage the creator. Otherwise you're one bad background fill away from a brand safety problem.

The contract is where this gets real. Not the press release. The contract.

Michael Heaven, co-founder of Butterfly 3ffect, pushes the same logic one layer deeper. The data underneath these models matters, he says. Agencies need to understand what's training the output, not just admire the output itself. And there have to be human guardrails, real ones, to stop something harmful from reaching a client.

He's right. The tool is only as trustworthy as the pipeline behind it.

Here's what I actually think

The report flags a pile of coming headaches. Compensation models shifting. Content quality dropping as volume rises. Creators burning out trying to keep up. Regulators circling.

All real. None of them change the direction.

Here's my honest read. 65% of marketers in that study plan to divert budget from other channels into AI-assisted creator content in the next 12 months. 70% expect money to move away from traditional creator content toward the AI-assisted kind. The money has decided.

But I keep coming back to something Chris Jacks at HireInfluence said. AI-enhanced content isn't better by default. A creator who uses AI to keep making genuinely valuable content will win. A creator who uses AI to just pump out more, faster, will drown in the noise they helped create.

Social media has always rewarded quality over quantity. AI doesn't change that rule. It just makes the penalty for forgetting it more obvious.

If you're running a media agency today, that's the sentence I'd tape to the wall. The tools have changed. The deal hasn't. The creators who use the new tools to say something worth hearing will be fine. The ones who mistake the tools for the message won't.

And the agencies in the middle? The good ones will get very specific, very fast, about where AI helps and where it hurts. They'll put it in the contract. They'll build the review process. They'll stop pretending this is a passing trend and start treating it like infrastructure.

The influencer world tilted. Most people haven't noticed yet. The ones who did are already rewriting their playbooks.