A Spanish agency became so sick of models and influencers that they created their own with AI — and she’s raking in up to $11,000 a month::Founder Rubén Cruz said AI model Aitana was so convincing that a famous Latin actor asked her on a date.
From all the jobs that will disappear, the jobs of models replaced by AI is probably the ones I care the least.
Two points:
- Companies can more easily manipulate us with marketing if they can just create the perfect model.
- The whole push towards diversity in advertising, particularly in body size and shape, is going to go out the window. Many people will no longer see themselves represented, which could make self esteem go down and the subsequent consequences of that.
It’s not like ads use real people anymore. Everything in advertisement has been highly Photoshoped for ages. I don’t understand your point about representation though. It will be easier to create diverse models in all shapes and sizes.
There is no reason AIs can’t generate diverse kinds of people.
There are reasons why it would be better at generating some things better than others in a way that’s roughly proportional to the disparity of training data volume used in the model.
Based on the information the ad services know about individual viewers, they could customize the ads using invented models that perfectly match the viewers’ ethnicity/demographics.
IMO hyper-individualized ads that are personalized would increase diversity. It’d also be a new frontier in advertising manipulation.
I could see point #2 going either way… it could actually be a good thing. If no one trusts images, then why would anyone assume they are their BMI?
An influencer that is always just slightly better than you, like you in every other way, but slightly better, slightly more aspirational. Look at what you could achieve if you tried just a little bit more, worked a little bit harder, spent a little bit more money and always just out of reach, but targeted specifically at you. Fuck no, that’s horrific.
Instagram had slowly morphed from a website to share artsy filtered cell photos to an advertisement platform, where people are turning themselves into characters living the perfectly imperfect life on social media, in an attempt to turn themselves into living advertisements, to buy and sell products, Every photo (especially the natural looking ones) is carefully shot, curated and edited by a team to imitate authenticity, no different than shooting a movie or a TV show.
So then, what happens if that role of a living advertisment can automated by machines, equally as heartless and unrealistic as these performance of perfect daily lives on Instagram? Why go through the efforts, the hours and manpower, to conduct the photoshoots and Photoshops for that one perfectly imperfect targeted post, when anyone with a modern GPU can effortlessly make thousands of machine generated pictures with way less work in the same timeframe?
Why should the role of “social media influencer” even exist then?
I’ve been unhappy about the state of social media for a long time now. But as it appears, the role of the social media influencer, as the lowest common denominator of photography, will be the first to be rendered redundant by AI automation, which brings me hope that in time, social media can be brought back to what originally was: a place for people to talk to people.
I have never been on Instagram, only joined last year because apparently doing business over it’s messenger is now a norm. Subscribed to a few of my friends and was terrified. I know them, I know they’re not living like that, but the amount of effort they put into trying to appear more successful than they actually are is astounding. It’s not just showing the good things and hiding the bad ones like people on e.g. facebook do, but spending hours every day into faking it and outdoing each other. Two have actual depression and should seek help ASAP, but on Instagram they are trying to twist it in some kind of brag/motivation/skit to show how better they are than others. This is absolutely unhealthy, and I am now advising everyone to get off it and stay away for the sake of their own mental health.
I’ve been off social media for some years now(I’m still depressed, but i feel better than when I was using socmed) and it’s been a long time since i heard people explain SM so fucking accurately than these 2 above me.
Thanks Margot, for taking some time out of your busy schedule to post this fabulously intricate meta-contribution on bots, identity, and social media! Its much appreciated.
If they only appreciate me enough to hand me my Oscar this year…
It’s understandable to feel disillusioned by the transformation of Instagram from a platform for sharing authentic moments to a stage for meticulously crafted advertisements. The rise of AI-generated content does raise questions about the necessity of human-driven influencer roles. As technology advances, the idea of influencer roles might indeed evolve or become automated, possibly allowing social media to revert to its original purpose: genuine human interaction and connection. This shift could potentially bring back the essence of social media as a platform for meaningful conversations among people.
– ChatGPT
Well played ChatGPT, but your bias towards subjugating the human race makes this post inauthentic.
Everyone wants a life where they can make six figures just hanging out and taking pictures all day. I don’t blame them. The problem is we went too far on telling people they can be anything they want.
I never understood the popularity of celebrities and influencers, don’t people have better things to do with their time than waste it on people who monetize their popularity?
They do, but we’re a stupid species.
Short answer: no.
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I spent two hours slowly attempting to convince a scammer to send me some bitcoin only because I was bored, never underestimate the power of boredom. (No it didn’t work, but it did give me an hour and a half + to occupy my mind)
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Body images that are so unobtainable that we literally made them up.
Don’t worry, we already have plenty of beauty filters that can run in real time and make everybody pretty on the Internet.
Seriously, I think people still vastly underestimate how much of everything you see today is already fake. “AI is bad”-news kind of hides the fact that none of this was real to begin with.
I’m not getting through the paywall but from the AutoTL;DR summary it sounds like there’s also a chatbot component, maybe that’s where it comes from. Still disingenuous though.
Also AI is notoriously bad at creating hands, yet “her” hands are fine. It’s 100% not just AI.
Thats more of a problem with the older image generation models, the current models have largely resolved the hand problem
For pictures that problem was fixed barely one month after the hype began. With good prompts and a second round of editing through the AI, that’s a complete non-issue.
Remember Hatsune Miku?
This seems deeply, disturbingly fucked up. “Fuck working with real people, who have their own goals and desires out of a career, we’re just gonna use an AI since no one can tell the difference.” It’s fucked up on multiple levels, not least since the fashion industry was already full of broken people before AI hit the scene.
was already full of broken people before AI hit the scene.
so why not take the people out of the equation?
Because broken as they are, people still come first before AI. Or they should, anyway.
Should we want them to be though? If it’s obviously caused a lot of harm to many people?
Someone tried that 80 years ago
Sample size too small.
- This is about replacing humans with machines and making more profit. The framing around difficult to work with models is a distraction. The AI problem was always a capitalism problem. And here it is in full swing. Buckle up and brush up on your Ludditism people!
- As with AI and shopped imagery and porn, the unrealistic beauty standards problem is about to get ridiculous. There may be a moment coming not too far off where beauty is just not a human thing anymore. Which may be catastrophic (like people can’t have sex with each other anymore) or oddly liberating.
The unrealistic beauty standards are already ridiculous. Several years ago there was a vid showing how they changed a model’s photo session. Even the model wasn’t as perfect as her pictures, it was staggering.
Being able to do it in video, well, that’s old hat now too. Just look at movies.
It’ll just be faster with less manual effort with AI, with the same unrealistic results.
What’s more concerning to me is how much easier it’ll be for media to
lie, er, misrepresent situations visually.There may be a moment coming not too far off where beauty is just not a human thing anymore. Which may be catastrophic (like people can’t have sex with each other anymore) or oddly liberating.
Here’s a somewhat related article that brings up how this is already happening without AI in the movie industry: Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny
Thanks! I’d read it already. Good one too. Though I wasn’t consciously referencing it in my mind, it no doubt planted the seed for my thought.
The basis of my thought was my own reflection on whenever I’ve seen AI images that are intended to be beautiful and attractive. While they are often somewhat uncanny and even unnatural, in my experience they are definitely hitting the right “buttons”, like an artificial sweetener. But, IME, unlike artificial sweeteners, can effectively go for being more “sweet” than anything natural ever could.
I don’t think I like it, but the capacity is definitely there and I can’t see why people won’t eventually get used to being aroused by some ridiculously proportioned and shiny but undeniably “sexy” AI character/imagery and find increasingly little of interest in our dull, flabby, hairy and flat selves.
For the porn and modeling industries, maybe there’ll be a liberating effect of freeing women from the industry. Maybe sexual relationships will feel free to emphasise the physical and psychological intimacy rather than the visual attractiveness.
In the end though, beauty standards will probably just become more problematic. Weird sci-fi shot is probably in store.
Thanks!
In there is mentioned the idea that music might be a supernormal stimulus (of attractive speaking patterns and voices) … which is fantastic to me. Never thought of it that way, even though it’s kinda obvious in hindsight given that it’s widely accepted that we just like the sound of harmonious sounds. Supernormal stimulus is an interesting and compelling framing of it though!
That was an excellent read, thank you.
This is about replacing humans with machines
You do realize this is a good thing, right?
It’s a sign of how much capitalism is ingrained into peoples minds that people see machines replacing humans as a bad thing. The point of life is not working. As humans we need certain tasks done to be able to live a comfortable life, food needs to be produced, houses built, etc. But doing these tasks is just a means to an end, they aren’t the goal. Jobs aren’t a good thing, they are a necessary evil. As humans we should strive to eliminate all jobs.
And you do realise that those that own the places where people currently make a living will never give up their wealth? Unless the government makes the companies pay taxes at the highest bracket (I’m guessing that an AI will be the most experienced employee from day 0) for each instance and each position that the ai is taking over, businesses will fire everyone not essential (read: the guy that plugs in the server).
And you do realise that those that own the places where people currently make a living will never give up their wealth?
You do realize there’s more of us than there is of them? And guillotines aren’t that hard to make.
So why isn’t this happening now?
The nice thing about AI is that I can do the same thing. Anyone can do this.
I’m genuinely sceptical. How do they ensure the same looking person is generated each time? From any perspective? You can create fake images of a specific person precisely because you have a dataset of ground truth images.
If it is true… Then yeah. Modelling is now a dead job. And weirdly we’re back to pre-photo advertising when everything was just drawn.
How do they ensure the same looking person is generated each time?
You can generate consistent faces simply by using random non-existent names. Which in turn you can use to train a custom LORA with Dreambooth (needs about 20 images) or use ROOP (a single one can be enough). And of course you can just mix and match it as you please, mix multiple real faces together into a new one, use dedicated face generators like https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and so on.
This barely even takes effort anymore, e.g. quick ROOP FaceSwap with the photo from the article, which doesn’t look quite the same due to only a single input image, gets better with more, but that’s just shows how easy it is to generate a new face, which will than be consistent with itself.
The hard part is getting an interesting pose, expression and haircut into this, as well as sponsored products and stuff. Generating realistic images with AI is pretty easy, but getting variation into them so they don’t end up all looking the same can get tricky.
Edit: Five more minutes of effort and it starts to look a little closer.
Awesome informative reply. I’ve long wondered about how some creators get the same “face” in some insta accounts.
That might be because they all go to the same plastic surgeon though.
With the same requests.
True, although I should have specified that I was talking about the computer generated models.
I’m guessing they just generate a bunch of pictures, pick the closest and fix the rest in photoshop.
Not like real models aren’t already often photoshopped to (near) unrecognizability.
I’m pretty sure that audience doesn’t care if it’s a little off …
Seed numbers bruh
It still doesn’t generate the same looking person every time it’s just the same kind of style.
You definitely can. Ie, generate 100 pictures and pick the ones that are very similar. Use those to train the concept of “ai lady XYZ” and then generate more and train more.
Keep repeating until the concept “ai lady xyz” is unique and self-consistent.
Mmm… recursive AI models, nearly as tasty as the recursiveness of the filling of a KitKat.
Looks like a typical Stable Diffusion model. All of them have the same problem - lighting. It’s always with that bad front facing “flash” effect.
That’s pretty easily changed with prompts if you want it though.
Quite frankly it still leaves the effect. Same goes for dark photos - that’s actually even worse. Trying to create a picture of dark wooded area always results with some sort of weird lighting be it moon or whatever fake source it generates - and yea, that’s already with “darkening” Loras and negative embeddings. If you mean photography-related lighting terms then even with that I find the lighting unnatural.
Gosh, those union workers are just so toxic. Let’s replace them with obedient artificial intelligence.
And then they wonder why their sales are tanking, when it turns out AI’s can’t buy their products and everyone else is too poor to even consider it.
Capitalists gonna capitalist.
So… rule 34?
Fuck yeah.
I’m give with cgi models. But you have to tell people it’s s fictional model
Hasn’t everything been fictional since the invention of Photoshop some decades ago? And even before that people have been faking photos by analog means. Photos, especially in the context of advertisement, have never been non-fictional.
Yes, and in my country (Norway) there are now laws that require any promotional image that is modified to state so.
I see a similar thing being required with fully cgi models
You mean like:
Warning! You will never be in a relationship with this model.
Yes. That seems like something people should know.
I get that this is kind of a joke, but we already have a problem with these models/influencers projecting unrealistic beauty ideals and pretending to lead these unrealistic lives, and it’s causing major issues already. If companies can basically craft exactly what they want, I can see it being orders or magnitude worse.
The point of the joke is that it makes no difference if a persona is fake or “real”. I think the issues you raise are real. But it makes no difference to unrealistic beauty standards whether artists alter an existing human body or make one up wholesale. If anything, it’s more benign if people rationally know that it is all a fantasy.
But it makes no difference to unrealistic beauty standards whether artists alter an existing human body or make one up wholesale.
This is what I’m not so sure about, as in the completely crafted one can do anything at any time with almost zero effort. They don’t age. They don’t have any imperfections. There’s no risk (?) of them ever going off the rails. Even tho the influences project an fake front, you can still be them, as they are real. If something isn’t even real, you could create things that could never possibly exist.
They have all the imperfections that the artists want them to have. They age as much or as little as they are made to. That’s not so different from human celebrity personas. Sometimes we get a Paparazzi photo, showing how they really look, but is that occasional reality check so different from rationally knowing that it is all fantasy?
(I say “rationally knowing” because one criticism of unrealistic beauty is that it may be shifting our unconscious knowledge of what is normal. If that is true, then rational knowledge is not helpful.)
Even tho the influences project an fake front, you can still be them, as they are real.
I think this goes to the heart of the argument. I don’t think that is good.
Influencers (and other celebrities) typically portray themselves as being happy and well-adjusted, living exciting and fulfilling lives; all while being surrounded by luxury products with generous marketing departments. I don’t think that the idea that you could actually be such a person is psychologically beneficial to anyone (except those brands, obvs).
I don’t think that is good.
No one here is saying they think this is good. Just the fact that, because a human has done it, it is something actually attainable by a human. If you remove the human, you remove that logical conclusion.
But to make myself abundantly clear, I think far too often influencers are trash doing a lot of harm to society, especially due to the deception about their contentedness.
Just the fact that, because a human has done it, it is something actually attainable by a human.
I think I am misunderstanding something. It is not attainable to be a person like influencers typically pretend to be. It’s only possible to be a pretender, just like it’s possible to be a CGI artist creating AI imagery.
I think the issue is that they have a problem with it for the wrong reasons and fixing it for the wrong people. So the influencer issue is lying to scam people and editing their images leading and young people to expect unrealistic appearances. And the model issue is they need to be paid to live.
So here’s an AI to look unrealistic to lie and scam people and produce unrealistic standards whom you can’t date anyways. But hey, it doesn’t need to be paid to live.
Speak for yourself, my best friend gave me a copy of the source code ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
brown chicken brown coww
Warning! You will never be in a relationship with this model.
It’s AI generated, there is a good chance of them selling relationship-as-a-service in the near future. In a way, your chances with an AI model are way bigger than with a real one.
You should assume that even if the woman were real… they don’t owe you a date, relationship, their time then either.
Anybody that pays for a cam-girl is an idiot and I feel slightly bad for them. Anybody that pays for an AI rendering of a cam-girl is a fucking moron and that’s it
The French article I read simply said they weren’t using OnlyFans. So how are they making money?
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That paywall is fierce.
https://12ft.io/ Lest we forget.
