The proliferation of artificial intelligence-generated social media personas—fabricated identities engineered to simulate intimacy, generate engagement, and extract revenue—is not a mere technical curiosity or an isolated case of online fraud. It is the product of definite social relations, the latest expression of capitalism's relentless drive to subordinate every sphere of human life, including the most intimate forms of social interaction, to the imperatives of profit.
Consider the now-common pattern: an account, presenting itself as a young woman, initiates contact with users, follows them, engages superficially with their content, and over time directs them toward a monetised platform—typically a subscription service built around the sale of images and the promise of personal connection. The images are often synthetic, generated by machine learning systems that can produce faces, bodies, and biographical details with no basis in any living person. Behind the persona lies not an individual but an operation: a coordinated network of accounts, often numbering in the thousands, engaged simultaneously in promoting subscription content, cryptocurrency schemes, affiliate marketing, and, in many cases, deliberate political manipulation.
This is not an aberration within an otherwise rational economic system. It is the logical outcome of a mode of production whose only measure of value is the accumulation of capital. Under capitalism, the drive to valorise every domain of existence—labour power, culture, personal data, and now the appearance of human relationship itself—knows no natural limit. Where earlier generations of capital extracted surplus value from the labour of the factory floor, contemporary platform capitalism has found a new frontier: the automation and mass production of simulated intimacy, sold back to an atomised population starved of genuine social connection by the very system responsible for that starvation.
The Marxist concept of alienation, developed in the nineteenth century to describe the worker's estrangement from the product of his labour, the process of production, and his fellow human beings, must be extended to grasp this new phenomenon. The user who forms an attachment to an AI-generated persona is estranged not merely from the "product" of the interaction—engagement, data, revenue—but from the very capacity to know whether a conscious human being stands on the other side of the exchange at all. This represents alienation raised to a new and more corrosive power: a rupture not simply in the relationship between worker and product, but in the basic social fabric through which human beings recognise one another as human beings.
Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism explained how the social relations underlying production come to appear, under capitalism, as relations between mere things—the definite social character of men's labour is reflected as an objective character of the products themselves. The industrialisation of fake identity intensifies this process. It is no longer only the labour embedded in the commodity that is obscured; the very existence of a human subject behind the social interaction is now called into question. What was once a distortion of the relationship between producer and product has become a systematic uncertainty as to whether any human relationship exists at all.
This has produced what can properly be termed an epistemic crisis—a breakdown in the individual's capacity to distinguish authentic social reality from its manufactured simulation. When a user cannot determine whether the party they are conversing with is human or machine, whether the apparent consensus they observe reflects genuine public sentiment or a synthetic operation, and whether the emotional bond they feel answers to any real person, the foundations of rational social discourse are undermined. This is not a new phenomenon in essence—the ruling class has always sought to mystify social reality in defence of its rule—but the scale and precision made possible by industrial-scale AI deployment mark a qualitative escalation.
The psychological toll of this environment falls heaviest on the youngest and most socially vulnerable layers of the population, precisely those still forming their capacity for social identity and trust. Where online interaction becomes dominated by artificial personas engineered to provoke engagement, dependency, or emotional exploitation, the conditions required for authentic human development—mutual vulnerability, uncertainty, and genuine stakes—are corroded. The generalised suspicion that results, a rational response to an irrational and manipulative environment, carries with it a high cost: deepening social atomization, the erosion of solidarity, and a retreat into algorithmically curated enclaves built on manufactured outrage rather than shared reality.
This atomization—the fragmentation of a population's basic capacity to trust and recognise itself as a collective social body—is the greatest danger of this phenomenon. The ability of working people to identify their common interests, recognise shared conditions of exploitation, and act together in their own defence depends on a baseline of social trust that mass-produced artificial deception is designed, whether by intent or by structural effect, to dissolve. A population rendered suspicious of every social interaction, uncertain of the authenticity of its own digital public sphere, is a population rendered correspondingly more difficult to organise.
The proliferation of AI-generated fake personas must therefore be understood not as a discrete technical problem awaiting a technical fix, but as a direct expression of the deepening social crisis of capitalism in its period of decay—a system that, unable to develop the productive forces in the interest of humanity, turns those same forces against the elementary social bonds upon which any rational, cooperative society must rest.
