Aitana Lopez is living the dream. She’s young, beautiful, lives in the charming city of Barcelona, and makes a good living with modeling. But she doesn’t exist, at least not like you or I.
Two weeks ago, Aitana had around 124,000 followers on Instagram. Now, she has over 211,000. Looking at the comments on her profile, you wouldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The usual mix of “you’re so pretty” and random spam gibberish is there, and there are hearts and emojis flying everywhere. But take a closer look and you start to see that something’s off.
The skin complexion looks a bit strange, although you could easily attribute that to filters. The hair is always in a strange position. Her facial features seem to slightly change from photo to photo. Look at it closely and you start to see that something’s definitely off with this person.
But in today’s rushed social media world, who stops to look closely?
Aitana likes gaming, fitness, and cosplay
Aitana’s story starts last summer when Rubén Cruz, founder of a model agency, was going through a rough patch. He didn’t have many clients and to top it off, a lot of the models were cancelling on him.
“We started analyzing how we were working and realized that many projects were being put on hold or canceled due to problems beyond our control. Often it was the fault of the influencer or model and not due to design issues,” Cruz told Euronews.
Cruz thought that with existing AI technology, you can create realistic images of people. In fact, you can tweak the AI so that it produces images of the “same” person.
So he went with it. It only took a few months for Aitana’s social media presence to grow more and more. Then, at some point, it seemed to explode.
“One day, a well-known Latin American actor texted to ask her out. This actor has about 5 million followers and some of our team watched his TV series when they were kids,” said Cruz.
“He had no idea Aitana didn’t exist,” he added.
People follow lives, not images
Creating images of a pretty girl can only get you so far, however. Lopez realized that Aitana must have a personality, hobbies — the things that people like to follow in celebrities. So, the team created a personality and hobbies for her. She’s a bit on the gamer side, with pink hair. She’s daring and loves fitness. She’s outgoing. She appeals to a pretty broad demographic.
Aitana earns around 1,000 euros, or $1,090, per advert. She usually makes about 3 adverts a month, but she’s earned her creators over $10,000 in one month. We can’t verify all of this, but judging by her social media success, it seems plausible.
It’s also easy to see why agencies would love this type of model. She can work whichever hours are needed; she can advertise anything; she can look however her creators want her to look; and most importantly, she doesn’t charge any money. Aitana is is the embodiment of the manic pixie dream girl who somehow loves to work for free.
In fact, you can create any number of Aitanas you want. Lopez also realized this and has already created another AI model — Maia, who is an equally attractive introvert with short white hair.
The beginning of sexualized AI?
By now, the odds are you’re starting to realize this has a pretty disturbing side. The age of AI influencers is upon us. The age of AI sexualized imagery is also upon us. In fact, Aitana also has a profile on FanVue, a subscription platform that’s relatively similar to OnlyFans.
To concerns related to this, Lopez says he’s only following market trends.
“If we don’t follow this aesthetic, brands won’t be interested. To change this system, you have to change the vision of the brands. The world in general is sexualized.”
He also adds that the industry is full of nonsense anyway.
The agency also says they’ve been contacted by other brands who want to make their own customized model.
“They want to have an image that is not a real person and that represents their brand values so that there are no continuity problems if they have to fire someone or can no longer count on them,” said Cruz.
Regardless of the ethical discussion, the value proposition that AI influencers bring is too large to pass on for companies. We’re already starting to see more and more such models, and the technology is only a few months old. We’re about to see a boom in which AI ‘influencers’ and ‘content creators’ become commonplace — maybe as common as real humans. Things are probably about to get pretty weird online.
