Digital Influence, Creator Economies and Communication Ethics: A Conceptual Model of Persuasion, Disclosure and Accountability in AI-Augmented Social Media Marketing

Abstract

The creator economy has become a primary channel of commercial and political persuasion. Artificial intelligence is now changing it from two directions. Creators use generative tools to produce content at a scale and speed no human team could match, while brands deploy synthetic influencers who never existed and AI systems that can match persuasive messages to individual psychological profiles. This conceptual, non-empirical paper develops a model of communication ethics for AI-augmented influence. It draws on persuasion theory and advertising ethics, on the influencer-marketing and creator-economy literatures, and on peer-reviewed research published between 2023 and 2026 on virtual influencers, AI-generated advertising and algorithmic and psychological targeting. Every source was checked against its Crossref record and screened for retractions and corrections. The paper identifies three requirements that persuasion must meet to be ethically legitimate. The audience must be able to recognise it as persuasion, must be able to identify who is persuading, and must keep the capacity to evaluate the claim. AI augmentation threatens each requirement. Generated content blurs the boundary between commercial and organic material, synthetic personas obscure the persuader, and psychological targeting and persuasive generation at scale weaken evaluation. From this recognition–identification–evaluation framework, the paper derives six propositions on the conditions under which AI-augmented influence remains ethically legitimate and legally compliant. It argues that disclosure rules designed for human influencers are necessary but inadequate, because they address recognition while leaving identification and evaluation largely unprotected. Using Nigeria's fast-growing influencer market and its advertising, consumer-protection and data-protection regimes as the anchoring case, the paper proposes a layered framework of obligations for regulators, platforms, brands and agencies, and creators.