WTF is a ghost creator?

By Alyssa Mercante • September 9, 2026 •

Ivy Liu

Forget AI-generated creators. There’s an army of people making content based solely on briefs. These “ghost creators,” or creators-as-a-service, are suddenly under the spotlight, but some marketers have actually been using them for years.

A September 2 Semafor article detailed how ghost creators are being used to rack up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube channels dedicated to politics by hiring actors to read repetitive scripts (seemingly generated with LLMs) about political figures. The article stated that Virelox, a content company reportedly co-founded by a man named Chris Chan, offered services to companies to help them go viral by spinning up creator accounts.

According to alleged posts from Chan, as of last August, the company released “2,500 organic videos every week for businesses, achieving billions of views every month.” Virelox reportedly had more than 106 YouTube accounts by April of this year.

Now everyone is talking about ghost creators, but most people are still fuzzy on what they actually are. Let’s get into it.

WTF is a ghost creator?

A ghost creator is a creator hired by brands to produce content that often follows hyper-specific briefs, usually under a pseudonym or anonymous persona that doesn’t map back to their real identity. In some cases, like the one described by Semafor, ghost creators are actors or dedicated (but small) creators who go by a fake name. Virelox reportedly posted a casting call on Backstage in July looking for “a reliable and professional on-camera spokesperson for a news-related YouTube channel,” signaling how political or newsy these ghost fronts can appear to viewers.

Not all ghost creators are actors; some know how to make decent content, but have a smaller audience. Julian Valdy is an app builder behind THE QUEST, a project funding company that runs a farm of 60 TikTok accounts pushing short-form content. He told Digiday he considers a ghost creator to be a “content operator” that “produce[s] and distribute[s] social media content through dedicated accounts.”

“You’re paying for their ability to create content and reach people, rather than for an existing audience,” he said.

Is this the same as faceless creators or AI-generated creators?

Yes and no. In some cases, ghost creators don’t show their face at all and instead make slideshows or animated content, particularly on TikTok. Sometimes they use a pseudonym, either because they’re actors or just to protect their identities.

“Ghost” describes the arrangement, not whether you see a face,” said Valdy.

But ghost creators aren’t the same as wholly AI-generated creators, because they’re a real person creating UGC, albeit occasionally aided by LLMs or other AI tools.

Instead, think of ghost creators as a way for brands to get UGC that feels authentic and won’t set off alarm bells for the AI skeptics.

Who uses ghost creators?

Aside from the companies mentioned in this piece, brands might tap ghost creators for cost effective content that hews exactly to their script and can be spun up fast.

They’re not creators, per se, but executors – hired to hit a brief, not build a personal brand.

“They’re pretty replaceable,” said Jeremy Carrasco, director at Riddance, a media intelligence platform and AI literacy publication. “You can spin up a bunch, and hope that one hits, and if it hits, you did your job, and you might kill the campaign once it’s done.”

Valdy implied marketers have been using ghost creators for years, suggesting the practice is “more familiar than the term” and people may call it “a creator program or an ambassador program.”

Carrasco believes marketing has been using these tactics for quite some time.

“As an AI-native, TikTok-native person, I’m just looking at [ghost creators] and saying ‘That’s just how companies advertise now,’” he said.

Joseph Perello, founder and CEO of Props Media Platform, explained why they may be enticing.

“We’re seeing brands question what I’d call the followers fallacy: the assumption that a creator’s value is primarily the size of the audience they bring with them. A creator can be highly credible and persuasive without having millions of followers. Those are two different assets – credibility and distribution – and brands no longer need to buy them as a bundle,” he said. “Brands can select creators for their expertise, perspective and ability to tell a credible story, then use paid media to distribute that work to precisely the audience they want to reach.”

Naturally, the big difference here is volume and repetition – if brands are pushing out the same content written with the help of LLMs through an army of “fake” creators, that’s far closer to a ghost creator than an ambassador.

Valdy’s Medium blog post about ghost creators details where brands can find them (including TikTok and Instagram accounts with “winning” posts, college campuses and UGC marketplaces).

What potential problems do ghost creators pose?

Obviously, when dealing with politics and misinformation, an army of ghost creators spreading the same speech across hundreds of thousands of views is very bad.

When it comes to marketing or a brand’s reputation, Carrasco said the problem with ghost creators churning out near-identical content is authenticity.

“Hiring people and giving them fake names…that’s inauthentic content by definition,” he said about Chan’s alleged ghost creator army.

For brands, ghost creators are a way to buy scale and control: UGC that looks authentic, at a fraction of the cost of marquee influencers (Valdy called them “cost effective”). For everyone else, they make already-murky social feeds even harder to read.

Plus, when political or issue content is fronted by ghost creators reading LLM scripts, it blurs the line between what’s real grassroots sentiment and what’s manufactured.

For Carrasco, ghost creators are a way for brands to route around platforms’ crackdowns on AI-generated content.

“You’re reverse-centauring AI-generated content…which is when a human carries out an AI automation because they’re effectively doing the last mile,” Carrasco said. “There are a lot of creators who are using AI to automate entire parts of their workflows, and there’s a lot of backlash about that. The difference is that when that happens, you know who to hold accountable. Your audience can react.”

Carrasco pointed to AI-generated wellness influencers clearly labeled as AI in ads as a transparent way to use AI for scaled content in the creator space.

“I don’t think that people assume that everything they come across on social media is completely real, but they do assume that they should be able to figure out if there’s a fake character being invented here to push a certain narrative. That’s a different thing,” he said.

Perello made a clear delineation.

“Where I’d draw the line with ‘ghost creators’ is identity,” he said. “If you make the creator completely interchangeable or anonymous, you risk removing the very thing that makes creator media powerful: a real person putting their identity and reputation behind what they say.”

What are platforms doing about ghost creators?

It’s not clear if every platform is aware of this kind of content. TikTok and YouTube didn’t respond to Digiday in time for this article’s publication. YouTube removed several AI-generated/-assisted political channels in August, after a different Semafor article about AI creators went live. Any account that runs afoul of a platform’s terms of service runs the risk of being shut down, and if the platform has explicit rules regarding AI use, spinning up fake creators reading LLM scripts for videos that can get hundreds of thousands of views will likely draw attention.

But what about creators hired solely to churn out hyperspecific UGC for brands? Should platforms flag these “fake” creators at all, or is this just a remix of an old tactic: does it even matter?