This was a big story a few years back, but I remembered it in class today when we started talking about the uncanny valley. There’s a girl on Instagram with over a million followers called Lil Miquela, except she’s actually CGI. There’s something so real looking about her that most of the comments on her posts are asking if she’s real. She has a back story, and online fights with other CGI characters. They have a whole world for themselves in the Instagram app. But then it starts to blur on reality. She advertises for different companies. She wears CGI versions of a companies clothes in a very strange marketing technique.

For example, in this recent Calvin Klein ad Lil Miquela (on the right) is kissing a real model.

This Vox article had an interesting tie back to SF that I thought would be interesting to share: “‘The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion,’ Donna Haraway wrote in her famous 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto.'” As SF has already moved from books to the screen, is this the next step? Is science fiction just becoming our social reality? Does this even count as science fiction?