Virgin Cruises Adopts Deepfake Jennifer Lopez as Spokesmodel

Creating deeper engagement

Although deepfake technology is often making headlines for fraud and scams, it is also growing rapidly as an entertainment technology. Deepfakes have been used to de-age characters in movies and recreate deceased actors. It also took center stage at America’s Got Talent in 2022, even making it to the finals. More recently, deepfakes have been showing up in advertising campaigns.

The latest example is Virgin Voyages. It launched Jen AI, a deepfake character representing Jennifer Lopez designed to customize your vacation planning. This goes beyond a celebrity deepfake deployed in an ad. The new website includes an invitation builder, resulting in a personalized video for your holiday companions.

We’ve created our next Jen(eneration) AI with our Chief Entertainment, Lifestyle & Celebration Officer, Jennifer Lopez, so she can customize an invite for you to help your crew get together for an epic getaway aboard our exclusively adult ships.

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With Jen AI, she can customize an invite for you and your crew — and when you give her a little insight about what and how you want to celebrate, she’ll generate and send a highly-personalized video inviting your crew on the celebratory voyage of your collective dreams.

According to Voicebot.ai:

Virgin worked with British agency Flaunt Digital to bring generative AI to the campaign, although it did not disclose where the technology originated. The process involves automated safeguards and human moderators to prevent Jen AI from generating any controversy with the promotion. In those instances, or if the AI doesn’t recognize how to say a name, the virtual Lopez just refers to everyone as ‘sailor,’ Virgin’s term for its passengers. Virgin and Lopez hope to leverage these tailored appeals to entice people to sign up for a cruise, where they will be obligated by maritime law to dance, according to the ad.

Deepfake as an Engagement Technology

Jen AI should be viewed as a market expansion for deepfake technology. Whereas television and movie studios have employed the technology for visual and audio effects, and consumer use of voice clones is popular, deepfakes have not made their way into product integrations like this before.

Everyday consumers can use Jen AI by answering a few questions. The configuration is limited today, but you can imagine this becoming more flexible, enabling a wider variety of options and final packaging.

Jen AI may turn out to be an ad campaign novelty that will be forgotten by next year. However, it shows that the technology is refined enough that you can integrate it as a value-added feature on a travel booking site. You could imagine something very similar coming from Expedia or VRBO.

You can also imagine similar applications integrating celebrities, friends, or family members into video games. There is little doubt that this is one more sign that creating deepfakes is getting easier, and that means its use among scammers will also increase.

However, for now, enjoy your personalized deepfakes to get excited about your cruise— if that is your kind of fun.