Build an AI Virtual Influencer for Instagram
Character-consistent fictional persona at scale. The Aitana López workflow — not the HeyGen/Synthesia workflow.
Branch B reminder: Synthesia and HeyGen cannot build this. They make talking-head video. A fictional Instagram persona needs character-consistent still images — which requires Stable Diffusion plus a custom LoRA. Different product category. See the cross-branch comparison.
The Aitana López benchmark
Aitana López was created by The Clueless agency (Barcelona). She has 149K Instagram followers and earns approximately USD 11K/month in brand deals. Her creator, Rubén Cruz, built her using Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and ChatGPT for captions.
The gap between that result and "I want to do that" is about 6 months of consistent posting and 4-8 hours of setup time. The tooling cost is ~£55 in month 1, ~£30-40/mo ongoing.
The workflow
Design the character in Midjourney
Generate 50+ variations, select the 20-30 best as training images. Cost: £24/mo Midjourney Basic.
Train a custom LoRA on RunPod
4-hour training run. ~£5 in GPU rental. Produces a character-consistency model for your specific face.
Generate scenes with ComfyUI
Load the LoRA in ComfyUI. Generate 30-60 images per month in different outfits and settings. Free software.
Caption with ChatGPT + disclose
Write captions in the character's voice. EU AI Act requires synthetic media disclosure on commercial content. Cost: £16/mo ChatGPT.