The Uncanny Rise of the World’s First AI Beauty Pageant
When poet John Keats wrote in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” he probably didn’t have AI influencers in mind. Perhaps he should have. Back in April, Fanvue, an AI-infused creator platform that falls somewhere between OnlyFans and Cameo in terms of services, launched what it’s calling the “world’s first beauty pageant for AI creators.” On Monday, the World AI Creator Awards announced the contest’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 find **Seren Ay**, a stunning Turkish redhead who is sometimes pictured doing jobs traditionally held by men in her country, like electrical lineman or firefighter. (She’s also a time traveler, posting “photos” with velociraptors and the first Turkish president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.) Then there’s **Aiyana Rainbow**, a Romanian biker babe/DJ whose creators have decided is queer—something they advertise through both her name and her shock of perfectly ruffled rainbow hair—and **Kenza Layli**, a hijab-wearing influencer from Morocco who already hawks everything from personal hygiene products to local tourism.
While Fanvue’s finalists run the global gamut in terms of origins, they’re also all capital-B beautiful, each possessing a supernatural combination of a buff (but not too buff) body, a stunning face, and the kind of effervescent personality that only really exists in influencer culture. Their hobbies and pet causes (Fashion! Inclusion! Travel! Hormonal imbalances!) are blandly interesting enough to make them palatable to followers and brands alike. Their image captions—some of which are written by actual humans and some of which are written by AI—are generally full of platitudes about how cool life is.
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. Winners are set to be announced later this month.
Berat Gungor, one of Seren Ay’s creators, says that “in AI, you actually can’t create an ugly face,” though he’s careful to note that no human faces are ever truly ugly. While it’s easy enough for image-generating newbies to end up with blurred features and weird hands, Gungor says his experienced team was able to create an initial pool of 300 beautiful women in Stable Diffusion, ultimately picking 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. (Just 2 percent of the “beautiful woman” images showed visible signs of aging.)
In some ways, those images are reflective of the pool they pull from. “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, isn’t the snake just going to end up eating its own tail? And what does that mean for those of us who aren’t traditionally beautiful, whose bust-waist-hip proportions can’t live up to Barbie-like online standards or who just can’t afford the upkeep on a head of perfectly coiffed hair?
More than anything, it means the rift between human influencer and AI influencer gets deeper. Aiyana Rainbow’s multicolor ‘do, for example, exists to attract attention. (Also, generative AI seems to love giving queer people colorful hair.) Creating someone with mousy brown hair or a 50-year-old gardening mom, for instance, wouldn’t have provided the visual hook needed, no matter how unrealistic or stereotypical that hook might be.
Brands, certainly, aren’t interested in rolling the financial dice on creators whose images aren’t as perfect as possible. And while in recent years there has seemed to be a general love of celebrities who are “authentic” online, that doesn’t mean that carefully curated influencer lives—real or AI-generated—aren’t being rewarded all the same.
Fanvue cofounder Will Monange says his service currently has “thousands of monthly earning AI creators” on its platform, a number that’s seemed to grow 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.
It doesn’t hurt that they’re beautiful on top of all of this. Or it does, but in the same way it hurts that society values one specific standard of beauty, whether on a human being or on some AI creation. In a world where millions upon millions of people follow hot influencers that they know, consciously or not, they’ll never meet or form a meaningful connection with, an AI pageant like Fanvue’s is a symptom of a larger issue, not a harbinger of impending doom.