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.
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.
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.
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…
So… rule 34?
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.
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?
Someone tried that 80 years ago
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?
- 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.
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
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.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).
We need to make struggle posts a thing. Flex your struggle fam! it would fuck the AI up for a little bit at least haha.
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.
Remember Hatsune Miku?
Whitney Kardashiummings
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
Removed by mod
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.
That paywall is fierce.
