Perhaps he should include. Back in April, Fanvue, a Artificial- filled father program that falls anywhere between OnlyFans and Cameo in terms of services, launched what it’s calling the “world’s second beauty pageant for AI creators”. On Monday, the World AI Creator Awards announced the tournament’s 10 semifinalists. Drawn from a pool of more than 1, 500 applicants, they are vying for the chance to make a liar out of Keats—and a prize package valued at about$ 20, 000.
Amongst those 10 finalists, you’ll get Seren Ay, a beautiful Turkey blond who is sometimes pictured doing jobs usually held by men in her nation, like electric lineman or firefighter. ( She’s also a time- traveler, posting “photos” with velociraptors and the first Turkish president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. )
Aiyana Rainbow, a Romanian cyclist babe/dj whose designers decided to be queer and Kenza Layli, a Moroccan dress influencer who now hocks anything from personal hygiene products to local commerce, are also present. ( This makes sense given that a recent study found that almost half of Gen Z respondents in the US and UK were “more likely” to be interested in a brand if they knew it had an AI spokesperson. )
While Fanvue’s finalists run the worldwide array in terms of origins, they’re also all capital- B wonderful, each possessing a divine combination of a buff ( but not too brown ) body, a beautiful face, and the kind of sparkling personality that only really exists in influencer culture. Their hobbies and pet causes ( Fashion! Inclusion! Travel! Hormonal imbalances! ) are blandly interesting enough to appeal to both brands and followers. Their image captions, some written by humans themselves and some by AI, are typically full of gimmicks about how cool life is.
While all that might seem surface- level at best, these totally fake beauties are n’t all that different from real- life pageant participants, especially in 2024. Hilary Levey Friedman, a sociologist who studies beauty pageants and whose mom was a former Miss America, says that she does n’t think the idea of an AI beauty pageant is a big deal considering” the long- standing practice in pageants of enhancing what you have”, whether that means surgery, hair extensions, fake tans, petroleum jelly teeth, body contour, or” chicken cutlets“.
Pageant contestants frequently use airbrushing and camera tricks to make their images pop, according to Friedman, something that has never been seen as a negative in the industry. This is true of headshots and social media posts in particular. When push comes to shove, though, there’s still a physical human behind that account and on that stage, living and breathing under all those lights and filters.
What makes an AI pageant different, Friedman asserts, is that Fanvue’s contestants are products of their creators. People who use AI might have a different perspective of what an attractive woman might be, she says, and they are drawing on all these stereotypes that we have about what a “beautiful woman” is. She may have pink hair, but she wo n’t have many moles on her face or a thin body, and she wo n’t be considered to be” traditional beauty.”
For the record, Fanvue’s contest, like human beauty pageants, will anoint a winner based on more than appearances. Unlike some of those contests, though, the World AI Creator Awards are looking for things like” social media clout” and how well their creators used prompts to create their contestants. Later this month, winners will be revealed.
Berat Gungor, one of Seren Ay’s creators, says that “in AI, you actually ca n’t create an ugly face”, though he’s careful to note that no human faces are ever truly ugly. While it’s simple enough for newcomers to get blurred features and strange hands, Gungor claims his experienced team was able to build a small group of 300 stunning women in Stable Diffusion, ultimately choosing Seren Ay’s face from the crowd because” she looked like a real person.”
Fanvue’s pool of thin, beautiful, mostly light- skinned finalists reflects what the Washington Post found when it tasked DALL- E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion with creating beautiful women. Stating that the programs tended to” steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness”, the Post reported last week that in the thousands of images it generated, almost all were thin, light- to- medium- skinned, and young. Only two percent of the “beautiful woman” images showed signs of aging ( below ).
In some ways, those images reflect the pool they are using. ” How people are represented in the media, in art, in the entertainment industry—the dynamics there kind of bleed into AI”, OpenAI’s head of trustworthy AI, Sandhini Agarwal, told the Post.
But if mass market images of thin, beautiful women yield AI- generated images of thin, beautiful women, who then turn into thin, beautiful AI- generated influencers, creating pictures that just feed back into the collective media stream, is n’t the snake just going to end up eating its own tail? And what does that mean for those of us who are n’t traditionally attractive, whose bust, waist, and hip measurements ca n’t live up to Barbie-like online standards, or who simply ca n’t afford to have a head of perfectly coiffed hair maintained?
Aiyana Rainbow is n’t 100 percent perfect—her face, her creators note, is n’t entirely symmetrical—but any quick- scrolling fan would be hard- pressed to notice any sort of flaw.
Brands, certainly, are n’t interested in rolling the financial dice on creators whose images are n’t as perfect as possible. And while in recent years there’s seemed to be a general love of celebrities who are “authentic” online ( see: the relative success of “give no shits” actors like Renee Rapp, Nicola Coughlin, and Dakota Johnson on press tours, for instance ) that does n’t mean that carefully curated influencer lives—real or AI- generated—are n’t being rewarded all the same.
Will Monange, the co-founder of Fanvue, claims that his company currently has” thousands of monthly earning AI creators” on its platform, a number that has appeared to increase exponentially over the past year. AI influencers like Aitana Lopez, whose creators are judging Fanvue’s contest, are doing similarly well, with hundreds of thousands of followers interested in Lopez’s virtual likes, interests, and lingerie pics. ( She even plays Fortnite online. )
The creators of Seren Ay’s online doll claim that Kenza Layli, the Moroccan contest finalist, receives about a 5-percent engagement rate on her posts, which most marketing professionals would swoon at the mouth for. She’s more than happy to provide that service.
It does n’t hurt that they’re beautiful on top of all of this. Or it does, but in the same way it hurts that society places a value on one particular standard of beauty, whether it be on a person or an AI creation. An AI pageant like Fanvue’s is a sign of a larger issue, not a harbinger of impending doom, in a world where millions upon millions of people follow famous influencers that they know, consciously or not, they’ll never meet or form a meaningful connection with.
