“Cloning Myself with AI”: AI Avatar as the affective infrastructures of the platform economy

Abstract

This paper examines how generative AI transforms the affective infrastructures of the platform economy. Departing from existing research that treats AI as a tool for content creation, the study analyses Douyin’s AI Avatar feature to show how generative AI intervenes in the relational and emotional dimensions of platform participation as a form of communicative bot. Drawing on a combined walkthrough and its exploratory “talkthrough” variant, we demonstrate that AI Avatars replicate and operationalise influencer personas: simulating intimacy, companionship, and social presence across chats, comments, livestreams, and voice interactions. These avatars automate affective labour by decomposing human expression and reassembling it into programmable, always-available forms of engagement. At the same time, they function as infrastructures of platform governance: redistributing responsibility onto creators, enforcing platform-defined boundaries around “authentic” creativity, and deepening creators’ reliance on platform-level data operations. Building on these dynamics, the paper investigates how Douyin’s AI Avatar mediates the relationship between content producers and audiences within the broader political economy of platforms. The paper contributes to debates on algorithmic governance, synthetic intimacy, and creative labour by arguing that AI-driven “style replication” is fundamentally a negotiation of social relations, one that recentres platform power and reorganises the conditions of human-AI collaboration.