The landscape of the beauty pageant industry has changed. The last five years have seen a sharp fall in the ratings for Miss Universe, which has been in existence since 1952. The community saw more uproar in May when the current Miss USA and Miss Teen USA relinquished their titles.
But a brand-new category of beauty pageants has surfaced. With one crucial exception—the women are not real—this pageant is very close to the traditional experience in many aspects.
Ten finalists have been selected by the World AI Creators Awards (WAICAS) to compete in a beauty pageant for women called “Miss AI,” where the winner will be determined by artificial intelligence (AI). Selected from 1,500 entries, the finalists represent global teams of creators. The creators generate photos of the women based on various language prompts using Open AI’s DALL·E 3, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion.
These ladies created by AI nevertheless have young looks and slender bodies, according to conventional notions of beauty. “DALL-E 3 defaults to generating images of people that match stereotypical and conventional ideals of beauty,” as Open AI has already acknowledged. Racial bias in facial analysis technology has also been discovered by computer vision specialists and the Algorithmic Justice League.
Ten finalists have been selected by the World AI Creators Awards (WAICAS) to compete in a beauty pageant for women called “Miss AI,” where the winner will be determined by artificial intelligence (AI). Selected from 1,500 entries, the finalists represent global teams of creators. The creators generate photos of the women based on various language prompts using Open AI’s DALL·E 3, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion.
These ladies created by AI nevertheless have young looks and slender bodies, according to conventional notions of beauty. “DALL-E 3 defaults to generating images of people that match stereotypical and conventional ideals of beauty,” as Open AI has already acknowledged. Racial bias in facial analysis technology has also been discovered by computer vision specialists and the Algorithmic Justice League.
Concerns about upholding conventional beauty standards were addressed by the WAICAS team in an email, where they stated their intention to concentrate on “celebrating diversity and realism.”
They assert that the goal is to support realistic creators who portray actual people rather than imposing impractical requirements. While it took decades for traditional pageantry to advance and become more representative, it is incredibly amazing that AI can do so quickly.
Three factors will be considered while evaluating these competitors: tech, clout, and beauty. Although influence can take many forms, the majority of AI-generated women are social media influencers.
Ten posts on the World AI Creator Awards (WAICA) Instagram feed introduce viewers to each of the AI-generated women. With her over 200,000 followers, one competitor, Kenza Layli, is credited with “contributing to the empowerment of women in Morocco and the Middle East.” Olivia C., a Portuguese woman, is presented as an additional “traveler,” demonstrating how technology may “enhance the human experience, not replace it.” In the meantime, Aiyana Rainbow, another AI-generated avatar, is described as a “embodiment of inclusivity and LGBTQIA+ acceptance” on her page, which features iconography of the LGBT community and rainbows in numerous postings.
These ladies have such distinct personalities that are portrayed on their Instagram pages that it can be easy to forget that they are not genuine. But everything, including their pastimes and interests, hairstyles, and the beaches they are lying on, is artificial intelligence (AI) produced.
Two humans, media advisor Andrew Bloch and author and beauty pageant historian Sally-Ann Fawcett, will judge the competition in part. Aitana Lopez and Emily Pellegrini, two AI-generated influencers, will join them to assess each carefully chosen AI contestant’s artistic merit.
The website of the pageant states that the winner will get over $5,000 in public relations support in addition to a $5,000 cash prize. On Monday, July 8, the World AI Creator Awards social media platforms will release an announcement video announcing the winner.
An opinion of a judge regarding the Miss AI competition and the idea of AI-generated women.
Fawcett, who has presided over beauty pageants in the UK for the previous ten years, offers a practical perspective to the judges. Fawcett says she was first dubious about being a contest judge when Fanvue, an AI-powered subscription service meant to assist creators in managing and expanding their online profile, contacted her. She was cautious of the public’s perception of AI ladies because she had no prior experience with the technology. Fawcett, however, thinks that influencers created by AI are here to stay and that the Miss AI pageant winner might encourage positive representation among AI influencers.
Fawcett explains that she reasoned that a small shift might occur if a thousand followers were to get a highly motivating message from a role model, an ambassador for the AI world who is a little more grounded. Change has to start from within.
Fawcett is hoping for the similar evolution in AI as she saw firsthand how beauty pageants have evolved since she fell in love with them in the 1970s. According to Fawcett, this is simply the first iteration of AI beauty pageants.
While most pageants in the 1970s were conducted and judged by males, Fawcett estimates that today, women run and judge 95% of pageants in this country. They aim to challenge the perception that artificial intelligence is mostly a male domain.
According to Fawcett, the tournament does not seek to reward a woman based simply on preconceptions. She emphasizes that with thousands of followers, these AI influencers, and hence their creators, have a responsibility to spread vital messages.
Rather than “beauty pageant,” Fawcett believes something closer to “a celebration of women” would be a better approach to define her goals for pageantry. Fawcett believes that future championships should be more diverse, including a competition for men.
[Contestants] have created—not all of them, but the majority—what they believe to be a stunningly attractive woman. And she believes they, too, require education in that it is fine to be beautiful, but there must be more depth, according to Fawcett. There must be someone realistic, not the cliché of an AI woman.
Meet the person who created one of the AI-generated contest judges.
One of the people behind the creation of Aitana Lopez, an AI judge for the Miss AI pageant and an influencer in her own right with over 300,000 Instagram followers, is Sofia Novales, the project manager of The Clueless Aigency.
Given the age of 25, Aitana is among the first AI influencers of her sort. Novales claims that the crew spent two months perfecting her distinctive pink hair and intricate personality.
According to Novales, Aitana’s team at Clueless wanted to participate in Fanvue’s competition to honor the creativity that they assisted in inspiring through the emergence of AI-generated influencers—the originality, the art, and the technology.
Novales addresses a popular misconception about AI-generated women, namely that their developers are guys who are merely producing their ideal woman. While she collaborates on Aitana with five other women, she admits that this mindset does exist in the industry.
Similar to Fawcett, Novales acknowledges the lack of diversity in the industry and the sexualization of AI-generated women. She claims Clueless is attempting to address these issues with their own AI avatars.
That’s the reason they are making 15 stock models—15 women and 15 men—that represent a wide range of sizes and cultures, according to Novales. It’s not necessary to create just women.
Clueless’s collaboration with Aitana is undoubtedly motivated by economic gain. Although the team did not initially generate revenue from their AI development, according to Novales, the virtual model can generate up to €10,000 ($10,840) every month, with an average of roughly €3,000 (3,252). Brand agreements with apparel and jewelry industries account for the majority of that. Aitana was part of a hair company’s promotional campaign in Times Square, New York City, only last week.
Beyond this, according to Novales, one of the driving forces behind the creation of Aitana was to lower the cost of model utilization for smaller businesses. This is because brands can now use AI-generated models for a fraction of the cost associated with hiring photographers, makeup artists, campaign creators, and model flight crews.
But she wants to allay worries: AI does not imply that models from the actual world will become outdated. They think they will coexist; according to Novales, there is merely more competition in the market and a different kind of service. While some firms will always prioritize working with actual clients, others will seek to innovate.
Tech professionals’ opinions about the realm of artificial intelligence-generated models
The Miss AI contest is an attempt by the tech community to acclimate the general public to AI-generated visuals using something they already know they like: beautiful women, according to Claire Leibowicz, Head of the AI and Media Integrity Program at The Partnership on AI (PAI).
She was taken aback by the “trendy-ness” of it and the incorporation of influencer culture, even though she and her team had anticipated the development of generative AI and advances in photorealism during the previous few years.
The use of a beauty pageant to encourage people to interact with technology is something she finds objectionable, but she sees it as relatively harmless compared to other, more sinister applications of generative AI, like the alarming deepfakes that are frequently used against women.
Leibowicz is primarily concerned with ensuring that people who view content created by these AI-generated ladies understand that these women are not human. Unquestionably, technology is advancing, becoming more involved overall, and making it more difficult to tell the difference between artificial intelligence (AI) systems and humans.
Miss AI, according to Leibowicz, represents our increasingly mixed AI-human information world, and even these “seemingly creative endeavors” are part of understanding how to determine if content is real or not. Creators require tools to ensure that their audiences understand what they are watching, and viewers require tools to comprehend it.
“If [the AI women] sell lip gloss, it may not matter. But if they’re instructing you how to vote, one of these influencers may have a distinct civic value and demand a different level of disclosure, according to Leibowicz. “So, I believe we need more transparency about who is behind these initiatives.
Nikhil Suresh, a machine learning consultant and Director of Hermit Technology, is more firmly opposed to the idea of “Miss AI” and AI influencers in general. Suresh finds people drawn to AI with a peculiar fascination, and computer experts simply wanting to have a hand in what they regard as the “future” of technology.
Suresh tells that he was particularly moved by a comment from a recent NPR report about Miss AI, in which one of the avatar makers claims his AI avatar is cheaper, more adaptable, and does not respond.
I just sit here, like, “Great.” Suresh describes a group of males who have made fake women that do not respond, citing the “problematic” nature of such inventions, as well as the perpetuated gender and racial stereotypes he observed while reviewing the top ten participants.
When asked why AI influencers look the way they do—generally, conventionally beautiful, slim, and with the racial bias mentioned above—Suresh responds that, in his experience, these programs are just taking from data that is available to them. When a prompt is given to these systems, the algorithm generates an answer and photo based on the massive amount of photos in the database, and with phrases like “beautiful” in usage, the results shown are what has traditionally been judged “beautiful” and how many photos are available.
In other ways, Suresh believes that much of this bias is simply a crude mirror of what was already going on in society. It’s not an AI problem; AI simply mirrors it. Leibowicz agrees, noting that it is much easier for these algorithms to produce people who perpetuate particular beauty standards, and that, while it is commonly assumed that creators choose these physical characteristics, many decisions are made at the technology model level.
She does, however, raise key questions regarding the contest’s premise: “Why is society so fixated on beautiful things?” Beyond that, what does it mean to have the opportunity to execute a beauty pageant differently? Is AI useful in this regard? Or does AI compound the issues that already exist in beauty pageants?”
Miss AI, according to Leibowicz, poses both technical and societal problems regarding how we as humans interact to beauty and technology. She recalls last year, when an AI-generated image of Pope Francis donning a Balenciaga puffer jacket went viral, deceiving many internet users, including Leibowicz herself. Miss AI is another milestone in the path of human and AI integration, notably on social media. She’s unsure how far it will go.
On the one hand, let this be the sole application of interactive and emotionally engaging AI; he is pleased that technology is being used for pageantry rather than manipulation,” Leibowicz argues. At the same time, why keep these current components of society that may bring forth things we wish to leave behind in order to create a more fair and just society?
