From Pixels to Personhood: AI Virtual Influencers and the Jurisprudence of Legal Personality

Lil Miquela has 2.6 million followers, a record deal, and a Prada campaign to her name, and she has never existed. Imma models for Ikea and Amazon from a Tokyo apartment nobody has ever entered; Aitana López reportedly earns her creators more in a good month than most human models earn in Spain. These figures occupy a genuinely strange legal position. They sign endorsement deals but cannot be sued for breaching them. They generate revenue but cannot own it. They say things that could constitute defamation or false advertising, with no settled answer as to who bears responsibility for what they say. Commentary on this problem reaches, almost by reflex, for the vocabulary of personhood - asking whether an AI influencer should be recognised as a person, or even whether she has rights. This paper argues that the reflex is a category error, and that untangling it requires taking the jurisprudence of legal personality seriously rather than treating “person” as a single switch to be flipped on or off. Working through the fiction, concession, and realist theories of personality that have shaped the concept since Savigny and Gierke, through Naffine's account of the person as a contested legal category, and through the stricter conditions that human rights law attaches to recognition before the law, the paper shows that virtual influencers satisfy neither the administrative logic that justified corporate personality nor the dignity-based logic that grounds human rights. What they need instead is a narrower, disclosure-centred legal status built around the humans and companies actually doing the work, and the paper closes by setting out what that status should look like.