First “Miss AI” contest sparks ire for pushing unrealistic beauty standards

An influencer platform referred to as Fanvue lately introduced the outcomes of its first “Miss AI” pageant, which sought to guage AI-generated social media influencers and in addition doubled as a handy publicity stunt. The “winner” is a fictional Instagram influencer from Morocco named Kenza Layli with greater than 200,000 followers, however the pageant is already attracting criticism from girls within the AI house.

“One more stepping stone on the street to objectifying girls with AI,” Hugging Face AI researcher Dr. Sasha Luccioni instructed Ars Technica. “As a lady working on this discipline, I am unsurprised however upset.”

Situations of AI-generated Instagram influencers have reportedly been on the rise since freely out there picture synthesis instruments like Stable Diffusion have made it simple to generate a limiteless amount of provocative pictures of ladies on demand. And methods like Dreambooth enable fine-tuning an AI mannequin on a particular topic (together with an AI-generated one) to position it in several settings.

The expertise has attracted criticism because it emerged in 2022, so it isn’t shocking that critics really feel the “Miss AI” contest units an unlucky precedent and objectifies girls. “In a discipline with such a obtrusive lack of gender range, it is unsurprising that it has come to utilizing AI producing pictures of what ultimate girls appear to be,” stated Luccioni.

However the contest, a part of the so-called “World AI Creator Awards” (WAICAS), appears designed in a approach that even unfavorable protection serves as publicity for a corporation that monetizes any form of consideration on-line, AI or not. In some methods, the larger story is that AI-generated fakery has permeated tradition sufficient that an outlet like CNN will now seemingly refer to AI-generated pictures of faux individuals as in the event that they had been human.

In a CNN article titled, “The primary Miss AI has been topped — and she or he’s a Moroccan life-style influencer,” trend journalist Jacqui Palumbo writes, “Meet Kenza Layli, a Moroccan life-style influencer who hopes to carry ‘range and inclusivity’ to the AI creator panorama. With almost 200,000 Instagram followers, and an extra 45,000 on TikTok, Layli is completely AI-generated, from her pictures to her captions and buzzword-filled acceptance speech.”

After all, it is not possible to satisfy Layli—she’s not actual. Layli is the creation of Myriam Bessa, founding father of the Phoenix AI company, who will reportedly obtain $5,000 money as a prize for her creation. CNN then quotes a video acceptance speech from Layli that appears like a video of an actual particular person with an AI-generated face substitute: “As we transfer ahead, I’m dedicated to selling range and inclusivity throughout the discipline, making certain that everybody has a seat on the desk of technological progress.” The speech carries little that means, having been supposedly spoken both by a chunk of software program or ghostwritten by its human creator.