Gold Coast, Australia. Miss Em, the Creative Director behind Bruce Ryder, redefines AI entertainment by creating a transparent, engaging AI celebrity that challenges our perceptions of synthetic media
As the global conversation around artificial intelligence continues to spark both curiosity and concern, a new kind of digital figure is cutting through the preverbal ‘slop’, not by pretending to be human, but by leaning into what AI can uniquely offer as animated content. Meet Bruce Ryder: Australia’s first AI celebrity, award-winning media disruptor, and the face of an entirely new genre of entertainment.
Created by Australian creative director Miss Em (Emma Barbato), Bruce Ryder is more than a synthetic influencer. He’s the lead character in a form of storytelling called hyperfiction, a genre that combines narrative, gaming, live interaction, and social media into one evolving entertainment experience. Unlike most AI avatars that exist to generate photorealistic content or mimic influencer tropes, Bruce exists to interact and play with followers in his own show ‘The Bruce Ryder Show’.
With a cheeky, self-aware personality and a fully transparent origin story, Bruce Ryder recently made headlines for winning Best AI Influencer of 2025 at the Australian AI Festival beating out a line up of corporate-backed international contenders. He’s also the first AI to co-present live with a human on a major Australian stage, opening the Retail Global conference in 2025 alongside Miss Em. Adding ‘movie star’ to his portfolio, Bruce was cast in the Belgian AI-driven short film Genesis.0, directed by Halim Alraishi. In February 2026, he kicks off a global tour starting in Los Angeles, in partnership with Hot Juice Studios.
With AI-generated content flooding our feeds, the public is increasingly skeptical of synthetic media often resisting some of it as inauthentic, deceiving or ethically questionable. Bruce Ryder offers an alternative that isn’t trying to deceive the viewer. Broadcasting from the retro Gold Coast, Bruce hosts a weekly radio-style show across Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook where viewers submit messages, respond to prompts, and actively shape the story. He also has a proven track record of brand collaborations, including a limited-edition grooming line for Ducks Nuts Ball n Body that sold and his own line of merch.
His show isn’t just interactive, it’s an experiment in collaborative fiction. Viewers become co-creators, not just passive consumers. This new format, driven by story and audience play, signals a cultural pivot from static algorithmic content toward what Miss Em calls hyper-media entertainment where humans and AI create together, in real time.
Bruce’s rise also speaks to a wider media shift: one where transparency, tone, and ethics as much as technical novelty.
As AI continues to disrupt every corner of media, Bruce Ryder proves that audiences actually don’t need synthetic perfection they want connection, play, and a great story, like we always have.
