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.
They frame this article in such a weird way. Like replacing the models and their jobs was justified because they had egos etc…
I can see similar framing used to replace other workers because they want to be paid fairly or do something drastic like take bathroom breaks… :D
I mean…the moment any large corporation figures out a way to replace human workers that need things like bathroom breaks (and basic human rights, and paychecks) and do the same work with robots and AI… literally the next moment, they’ll have the AI start generating layoff notices.
It’s just less flashy when it happens that way because there’s no need for that AI to look like a beautiful young person.
But… why would you not replace workers with robots when you can? Serious question.
The alternative is paying people to do an unneeded job, and that’s not sustainable. How do we intend to pay a person who contributes nothing to society?
I feel there are going to be a shitload of questions like this in the coming decade. We’ve navigated such upheavals before, such as during the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the Information Age. But now? Seems quite different.
Had this talk with a more conservative acquaintance about minimum wage:
“We gotta pay these people a living wage. What about all the dumbasses out there that can’t handle more than a convenience store job?”
“Not my problem.”
“But those people are OUR problem. Want to give them more welfare? Want them to be homeless with all the problems that brings?”
Anyway, some fool will come along shortly and scream, “UBI!”. If you get a simple answer to a complex question, the answering party is simple.
How do we intend to pay a person who contributes nothing to society?
Why must we value how a person “contributes to society” via their output for capitalism?
Is studying philosophy useless? Is making art? Is reaping the benefits of a society built upon tens of thousands of years of human innovation to just sit back and relax a bit?
Humanity worked hard to get to a point where this is even a question. If you listen to the capitalists saying “If you’re not working you’re worthless” then you’ve been tricked. Tens of thousands of years of human innovation and suffering to advance society to a point where we don’t all have to work, but the rich want you to think that’s a bad thing. It is not natural that the benefits of all of that effort and suffering should all collect in the hands of a few at the top while everyone else suffers.
The “simple answer” is UBI because there literally is no alternative short of outright killing people that don’t work to maintain automation. You and everyone else deserves a cut of that pie, we and all of our ancestors put blood, sweat, and tears into it. Let the people relax and enjoy the fruits of that society.
The alternative is paying people to do an unneeded job, and that’s not sustainable.
Well unfortunately that’s the proposed solution too. When you ask an AI optimist what their solution is for workers after their jobs are replaced by ai, a common answer is a universal basic income. But if you believe it’s unsustainable to pay a person to do a job that could be done by a robot (which for the record isn’t really accurate, as we’ve been sustaining that), then it probably isn’t sustainable to pay that same person for doing nothing…
So we’re left with the same problem, what do we do about the workers?
I wonder if UBI is more unsustainable, or unsustainable at all - imagine a future where most things can be produced so efficiently without the involvement of humans that the idea of not doing so is simply preposterous, akin to insist on using horses after motorization became widely available. Employing humans might incur a higher lost opportunity cost than simply paying everybody to do “nothing”. I’m using “” since all those people would of course do something, just not grind for bare survival or “the economy”, which is arguably isn’t necessary anymore, or at least not as necessary as it once was.
In a way, overcoming work (as in “unwanted compensated grind”) is a way to truly live up to our potential as humans because it asks the very basic question of “how to be?” outside of what for millennia was basic necessity or narrowly defined by society.
I would say it is sustainable IF it’s rolled out properly, if you are only just barely given enough to survive, your not going to take risks for creatiivities sake and end up going back to a grind of some sort to get that slightly more sustainable odds. The real big problem is how do we deal with the jobs that can’t be automated? How does society react to after spending decades training in order to specialize in something so they can survive cope with others who can now thrive without it? Do we see massive unemployment from critical organizations/companies as workers decide to indulge in their passions on UBI instead of slave away for a sustainable living? Do we need to wait until all jobs can be automated before this is even possible, or does the society we have today collaspe? These are some of the actual difficulties with rolling out UBI and a proper solution has to address them for them to be sustainable. As it sits I don’t know if we even are at a level to do much, most ai would be good for say being a CEO or high level executive looking at trends and creating a curve essentially to fit the data points those trends are creating. But how would people react to CEOs getting obsoleted and collecting UBI with their golden parachutes still? Probably pretty damn fucking badly, calling for UBI to be abolished or some shit and you wouldn’t see much resistance as the share holders can eventually reap in the profits when we created precedent for no UBI related to jobs that AI/automation took over. So you need protections there first but our governments are reactive and not proactive. Sure maybe an authoritarian regime could enforce it but now you have to hope you have a benevolent dictator, which is pretty much an oxymoron, and they would need the foresight to leave democracy in there absence. Not to mention that force would need to be a global government or other economies still based on capitalism ideals without UBI are going to take advantage of their position leading to unsustainablity and eventual collaspe. We have a lot of fucking work a head of us but if you were to compare hunter gathers to today’s societies and advancements it would almost seem impossible. I don’t expect UBI or full on automation to make it into our societies without some sort of societal collaspe first that allows us to rebuild with the understandings of our current systems failures clearly documented. I think we are many generations off from that rebuilt society even if we bear witness to our societies collapse in the upcoming generations. But I agree it would signify a huge advancement in humanity and probably give us the foundations to truly become a type 1 civilization and set the stages for possible advancements to a type 2 civilization. But we are not there yet, unfortunately.
then it probably isn’t sustainable to pay that same person for doing nothing…
Why is that unsustainable?
That person isn’t going to spend their life doing “nothing,” humans have an intrinsic need to do something. Psychology has shown us pretty conclusively. The difference is once we’ve automated so much, that can be whatever we want instead of focusing on the bare necessities to survive. The only way “paying someone to do nothing” is unsustainable is if you’ve bought into the lie that our value as human beings is inherently tied to what we produce for capitalism.
I actually don’t agree that is is unsustainable, I was just pointing out the logical falicy. It’s a weird thing to say that “paying a person to do a newly unnecessary job is unsustainable”, especially in the context of AI. It doesn’t make sense to complain about something when the only proposed solution is doing the exact same thing in a more roundabout way.
Also, something that has been done successfully for years doesn’t suddenly become unsustainable just because new methods arise.
It was just a weird post.
But personally, I’m in favor of a UBI, I think it would likely work just fine and solve a plethora of problems that have been ignored in this country (USA) for too long.
I actually don’t agree that is is unsustainable, I was just pointing out the logical falicy. It’s a weird thing to say that “paying a person to do a newly unnecessary job is unsustainable”, especially in the context of AI. It doesn’t make sense to complain about something when the only proposed solution is doing the exact same thing in a more roundabout way.
As the other person was getting at its not a logical fallacy. One is having wasted potential ( workers doing jobs that should be automated away ) the other is capitalizing on that new found potential by giving them the means to survive maybe even thrive if we actually get UBI right. One is unsustainable as you are paying to keep appearances up for no positive benefit, the other frees a market of labor to do creative and inventive tasks that can further humanity and provide even more benefit.
Anyway, some fool will come along shortly and scream, “UBI!”.
It sounds like you have other suggestions? Or at least objections to this one?
It’s just so hard to see where we transition from here.
We went from a resource economy to a manufacturing economy to a service economy… And now many services are being automated. So what’s next?
I’m in favor of the automation but recognize it’s going to cause pain in the near future.
I’ve seen people tout a ‘creative based economy’, but to be honest LLMs and GANs seen poised to grab that sector before anyone in service can transition to it.
You’d hope all of this would mean an easier life, but so long as capitalism is the name of the game there is zero incentive to spread the benefits among all.
Why do you feel this is different from the Industrial Revolution et al? They also made certain jobs redundant. People were either given different tasks or had to find different a new job. It was certainly not easy and I would certainly like things to go over smoother this time around, but in my mind, worst-case is that it will simply go over like in the Industrial Revolution.
I for sure 100% want you deciding what we do with the, "dumbasses out there that can’t handle more than a convenience store job”
Is that a good thing or bad thing to you?
Thanks for asking. Good I suppose. It means all this talk and moaning about being too hard to implement and there’s no system in place is prooven to be a lie. I mean, we already knew it was a lie but this is as close to proof as we’re going to get. It’s already in place, no big shocks, just tag it onto the system that’s already in place all that really changes is the name. First step is change it from welfare to basic income. Then we add the universal part afterwards. Not so scary anymore
The problem isn’t the funding it’s people’s reactions. Why slave away for someone else’s company even if it provides utility for your society if you can survive and even thrive creatively on UBI? What happens then, do we get worse class warefare then we have now? What happens when people realize most of what can be automated away at current levels are executive and CEO positions? When they leave with Golden parachutes are you gonna ask for UBI for them? No then we have set a precedent legally for those automated away jobs to not receive UBI or you just facilitated more capitalistic greed for those executives. Is UBI setup on a global scale? No then how do you enforce dual citizenship individuals from collecting UBI and working another job remotely from the second nation they are registered with creating inefficiencies in our program with could make it a target for regressive policies. Think Republicans constantly saying illegals are stealing our benefits so we should block them and cut funding to the programs, how do we defend against those attacks? I mean I can keep going, but the problem is how do we implement this without everything being automated and create a fair and equitable system for all involved? While it would be nice to just throw money at everyone you need to take into account individuals reactions to this. We aren’t in a vacuum and yet we isolate ourselves in echo chambers as if our perspectives are the only ones out there, we loose nuance by doing this and then get aggravated something isn’t done because the cause of that nuance isn’t even on our radar from lacking communication with other people who have differing views and opinions.
Surviving and thriving creatively are two very different things. Those who can thrive creativity may well deserve it but they will be a small minority. Everyone else will either have to go to work or be content in crappy housing with basics while they figure out if they want to live like that forever. And yes universal means ceos get it too. Any tax they pay will easily offset whatever they get from ubi. The big reason for making it universal is because there’s no means testing which makes it cheaper to implement. What ever system we have for welfare can be included as rules for UBI as far as citizenship goes. If it’s already being done then there’s not much to work out beyond expanding it
They don’t need a justification. It is just capitalism. The second it becomes profitable to develop and implement an AI to replace a human, it will be done. And half the country/world will be rooting for them saying “yeah, go capitalism!”
Capitalism created influencers in the first place. No, we don’t need ordinary people living imaginary lives to create consumers who are being sold a lie.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Wait, what is wrong with this?
I mean the model is the backdrop, these fashion companies aren’t selling models, there selling clothes.
If you were already going to use Photoshop and stock photos the fill out the background, put the model on a beach, adjust the time of day, put other people into the photo, add sone palm trees, etc. The model (and indeed the entire original photo) is now a very small part of this the final product. If you could now just photograph your clothing on posed mannequins and fill in ai generated faces, what’s so wrong about that? Why does the person wearing the clothes your selling matter more than the the people added from stock photos?
Why use any human-like image then? A lot of amateur fashion designer on instagram use mannequins or busts. The models are serving a purpose. Removing them means someone loses a job.
If we look at this from top-down you’re right because the company is saving a cost. But from the bottom-up, you’ve just become more expendable. This leads into the arguments others have been making, what happens when eventually people can’t work? And why should we use technology to serve the few and not the many?
I read this story a few days ago, and it smacks of bullshit.
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?
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?
Someone tried that 80 years ago
Sample size too small.
Gosh, those union workers are just so toxic. Let’s replace them with obedient artificial intelligence.
Capitalists gonna capitalist.
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.
Body images that are so unobtainable that we literally made them up.
I feel like considering it AI is disingenuous, though. It’s a team of graphic artists, no? Like you have to digitally render every piece of clothing and assemble ensembles you want to sell.
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.
I’m not getting through the paywall but from the AutoTL;DR summary it sounds like there’s also a chatbot component, maybe that’s where it comes from. Still disingenuous though.
Also AI is notoriously bad at creating hands, yet “her” hands are fine. It’s 100% not just AI.
Thats more of a problem with the older image generation models, the current models have largely resolved the hand problem
For pictures that problem was fixed barely one month after the hype began. With good prompts and a second round of editing through the AI, that’s a complete non-issue.
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.
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…
It’s understandable to feel disillusioned by the transformation of Instagram from a platform for sharing authentic moments to a stage for meticulously crafted advertisements. The rise of AI-generated content does raise questions about the necessity of human-driven influencer roles. As technology advances, the idea of influencer roles might indeed evolve or become automated, possibly allowing social media to revert to its original purpose: genuine human interaction and connection. This shift could potentially bring back the essence of social media as a platform for meaningful conversations among people.
– ChatGPT
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.
Yeah this title is dumb as hell. Some models and influencers are difficult to work with, and some are easy. The ones that are shitty get less work, naturally. It’s just like any other industry. My partner works with them all the time.
This company made an AI model because they’re fucking cheap.
I never understood the popularity of celebrities and influencers, don’t people have better things to do with their time than waste it on people who monetize their popularity?
Short answer: no.
Long answer?
Noo…
You probably thought I was going to write a long ass “no” but I didn’t.
Please continue with your day.
…ooooooooooo
I spent two hours slowly attempting to convince a scammer to send me some bitcoin only because I was bored, never underestimate the power of boredom. (No it didn’t work, but it did give me an hour and a half + to occupy my mind)
Remember Hatsune Miku?
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
Looks like a typical Stable Diffusion model. All of them have the same problem - lighting. It’s always with that bad front facing “flash” effect.
That’s pretty easily changed with prompts if you want it though.
Quite frankly it still leaves the effect. Same goes for dark photos - that’s actually even worse. Trying to create a picture of dark wooded area always results with some sort of weird lighting be it moon or whatever fake source it generates - and yea, that’s already with “darkening” Loras and negative embeddings. If you mean photography-related lighting terms then even with that I find the lighting unnatural.
I’m genuinely sceptical. How do they ensure the same looking person is generated each time? From any perspective? You can create fake images of a specific person precisely because you have a dataset of ground truth images.
If it is true… Then yeah. Modelling is now a dead job. And weirdly we’re back to pre-photo advertising when everything was just drawn.
How do they ensure the same looking person is generated each time?
You can generate consistent faces simply by using random non-existent names. Which in turn you can use to train a custom LORA with Dreambooth (needs about 20 images) or use ROOP (a single one can be enough). And of course you can just mix and match it as you please, mix multiple real faces together into a new one, use dedicated face generators like https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and so on.
This barely even takes effort anymore, e.g. quick ROOP FaceSwap with the photo from the article, which doesn’t look quite the same due to only a single input image, gets better with more, but that’s just shows how easy it is to generate a new face, which will than be consistent with itself.
The hard part is getting an interesting pose, expression and haircut into this, as well as sponsored products and stuff. Generating realistic images with AI is pretty easy, but getting variation into them so they don’t end up all looking the same can get tricky.
Edit: Five more minutes of effort and it starts to look a little closer.
I’m guessing they just generate a bunch of pictures, pick the closest and fix the rest in photoshop.
Not like real models aren’t already often photoshopped to (near) unrecognizability.
I’m pretty sure that audience doesn’t care if it’s a little off …
Seed numbers bruh
It still doesn’t generate the same looking person every time it’s just the same kind of style.
You definitely can. Ie, generate 100 pictures and pick the ones that are very similar. Use those to train the concept of “ai lady XYZ” and then generate more and train more.
Keep repeating until the concept “ai lady xyz” is unique and self-consistent.
Mmm… recursive AI models, nearly as tasty as the recursiveness of the filling of a KitKat.
So… rule 34?
Fuck yeah.
I’m give with cgi models. But you have to tell people it’s s fictional model
Hasn’t everything been fictional since the invention of Photoshop some decades ago? And even before that people have been faking photos by analog means. Photos, especially in the context of advertisement, have never been non-fictional.
Yes, and in my country (Norway) there are now laws that require any promotional image that is modified to state so.
I see a similar thing being required with fully cgi models
You mean like:
Warning! You will never be in a relationship with this model.
Yes. That seems like something people should know.
I get that this is kind of a joke, but we already have a problem with these models/influencers projecting unrealistic beauty ideals and pretending to lead these unrealistic lives, and it’s causing major issues already. If companies can basically craft exactly what they want, I can see it being orders or magnitude worse.
The point of the joke is that it makes no difference if a persona is fake or “real”. I think the issues you raise are real. But it makes no difference to unrealistic beauty standards whether artists alter an existing human body or make one up wholesale. If anything, it’s more benign if people rationally know that it is all a fantasy.
But it makes no difference to unrealistic beauty standards whether artists alter an existing human body or make one up wholesale.
This is what I’m not so sure about, as in the completely crafted one can do anything at any time with almost zero effort. They don’t age. They don’t have any imperfections. There’s no risk (?) of them ever going off the rails. Even tho the influences project an fake front, you can still be them, as they are real. If something isn’t even real, you could create things that could never possibly exist.
They have all the imperfections that the artists want them to have. They age as much or as little as they are made to. That’s not so different from human celebrity personas. Sometimes we get a Paparazzi photo, showing how they really look, but is that occasional reality check so different from rationally knowing that it is all fantasy?
(I say “rationally knowing” because one criticism of unrealistic beauty is that it may be shifting our unconscious knowledge of what is normal. If that is true, then rational knowledge is not helpful.)
Even tho the influences project an fake front, you can still be them, as they are real.
I think this goes to the heart of the argument. I don’t think that is good.
Influencers (and other celebrities) typically portray themselves as being happy and well-adjusted, living exciting and fulfilling lives; all while being surrounded by luxury products with generous marketing departments. I don’t think that the idea that you could actually be such a person is psychologically beneficial to anyone (except those brands, obvs).
I don’t think that is good.
No one here is saying they think this is good. Just the fact that, because a human has done it, it is something actually attainable by a human. If you remove the human, you remove that logical conclusion.
But to make myself abundantly clear, I think far too often influencers are trash doing a lot of harm to society, especially due to the deception about their contentedness.
Just the fact that, because a human has done it, it is something actually attainable by a human.
I think I am misunderstanding something. It is not attainable to be a person like influencers typically pretend to be. It’s only possible to be a pretender, just like it’s possible to be a CGI artist creating AI imagery.
I think the issue is that they have a problem with it for the wrong reasons and fixing it for the wrong people. So the influencer issue is lying to scam people and editing their images leading and young people to expect unrealistic appearances. And the model issue is they need to be paid to live.
So here’s an AI to look unrealistic to lie and scam people and produce unrealistic standards whom you can’t date anyways. But hey, it doesn’t need to be paid to live.
Speak for yourself, my best friend gave me a copy of the source code ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
brown chicken brown coww
Warning! You will never be in a relationship with this model.
It’s AI generated, there is a good chance of them selling relationship-as-a-service in the near future. In a way, your chances with an AI model are way bigger than with a real one.
You should assume that even if the woman were real… they don’t owe you a date, relationship, their time then either.
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This is actually very easy to do. Check out LoRAs and textual inversions on CivitAI.
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