How AI Hosts Flooded China’s Livestream Platforms

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The bots are cheap, obedient, and never need to take a break from hawking goods. But do customers actually like them? By Fan Yiying and Dong Ziqing On China’s livestream platforms, there is now a good chance that the influencer urging you to buy some heavily discounted product is an artificial intelligence-generated digital avatar. Live commerce is a massive industry in China. Millions of people host livestream shows, selling everything from lipstick to luxury real estate. In 2023, the country’s livestream e-commerce market was worth 4.9 trillion yuan ($691 billion), up 35% year over year. But e-commerce companies are increasingly replacing their human hosts with AI bots, which are cheaper to hire and can livestream for 24 hours a day without getting tired, state-run news agency Xinhua reported Thursday. AI livestream hosts first began to appear on Chinese platforms a few years ago, and they are now rapidly gaining traction. There are now over 993,000 digital avatar companies liste ………………………………