What began as a curious investigation into artificial intelligence’s potential role in celebrity culture swiftly turned into feelings of uneasiness when I gradually realised that they were already here. At least in a rudimentary way. They still exist within the uncanny valley, but that valley is beginning to close, and I’m fairly certain we won’t be able to tell whether the superstars we see on screens are real or not in the not too distant future.
In this video, I look at two AI Influencers: ‘Anna Indiana,’ an AI Singer Songwriter, created anonymously, and ‘Aitana Lopez,’ a Digital Creator with over 213K followers and an Onlyfans account that is supposedly growing and bringing in over $10,000 per month.
Is it a ruse or a deception? It doesn’t appear to be. Here you have an AI Model that says as much, and yet lonely guys from all over the world come to this imaginary company and contribute their hard earned money for NSFW AI generated content.
And I can’t stop thinking about how bizarre that is. If anything, it implies that many men are content to project their idealised versions of women onto a fabrication that does not exist in physical reality. They prefer fiction to reality. The fact that manufactured perfectionism is what we desire rather than anything tangible makes me feel a little sad; at least when it comes to the subject of human relationships.
Knowing how Stable Diffusion works, I decided to test some of the newer tools available to see how easy it was to create my own ‘Digital Creator’ and well… Turns out you don’t need much skill at all to manufacture a whole person…
Furthermore, it appears that a growing number of technologies are on the horizon that will allow us to convert still photographs of illustrated characters or even people into animated videos.
This technology will have many valuable uses in the creative space, but it won’t all be rainbows and sunshine. More malevolent people will soon have a new set of tools at their disposal to force others to submit to their will.
The cat is already out of the bag, and it’s ridiculous to expect it to want to return now that it’s experienced the great outdoors. The most we can do is stay up to date with this technology so that we’re aware of its capabilities and do not fall victim to future scams or deceptions.
