[imagesource:easypeasyai]

It might sound like fun, but the latest AI-inspired idea has an uneasy dystopian feel.

The world’s first artificial intelligence beauty pageant has been launched by The Fanvue World AI Creator Awards (WAICAs), with a host of AI-generated images and influencers competing for a share of $20,000 (R380,000).

Participants of the Fanvue Miss AI pageant will be judged on three categories:

• Their appearance: “the classic aspects of pageantry including their beauty, poise, and their unique answers to a series of questions.”
• The use of AI tools: “skill and implementation of AI tools used, including use of prompts and visual detailing around hands and eyes.”
• Their social media clout: “based on their engagement numbers with fans, rate of growth of audience and utilisation of other platforms such as Instagram”.

Participants need to submit their creations and answer a series of questions including “What would be your one dream to make the world a better place?”

The contestants of the Fanvue Miss AI pageant will be whittled down to a top 10 before the final three are announced at an online awards ceremony next month.

The co-founder, Will Monanage, has said he’s hoping it will become “the Oscars of the AI creator economy.”

“The creator economy is an extremely exciting place to be in right now, and with the help of our platform, there’s been exponential growth in AI creators entering the space, growing their fanbases, and monetising content,” added Monanage.

Britain’s pageant historian Sally-Ann Fawcett is part of the panel of judges – one of the two human judges, as the panel includes AI models Emily Pelligrini (who became ‘famous’ last year after footballers and other celebrities apparently wrote to her believing she was real) and Aitana Lopez, a pink-haired fake Spanish model who earns up to €10,000 a month for her male creator by modelling clothing for brands.

 

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A post shared by Aitana Lopez✨| Virtual Soul (@fit_aitana)

Amidst the concerns that AI is threatening job security and artistic professions, this move into the pageant industry just feels like the organisers have come up with the following: “Considering real beauty pageants are criticised for dehumanising women, let’s dodge that bullet by having contestants which aren’t human to begin with!”

There’s also the fact that a pageant of this nature further creates unrealistic beauty standards through now computer-generated ‘perfection’. And there’s also no Mr AI competition yet, reinforcing once more a misogynistic streak to the gendered beauty norms.

 

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A post shared by fanvue (@fanvue)

There are no restrictions on the AI tools that creators can use, so whether you are into Midjourney, Gencraft, WonderAI, or have your own set of tools, you can ‘create’ anyone you want, as long as your contestant is 100% AI-generated.

To that end, we decided to create our very own beauty queens for a shot at the R380,000, with a simple prompt: “The most beautiful woman in the world”. It was interesting, and concerning, that unless we specified ‘dark-haired’, or ‘African’, our AI generator only produced an endless stream of blonde, blue-eyed women.

Eventually, after circumventing AI’s inherent bias towards the Swedish volleyball team, we found our candidates for Miss AI:

Judging by how easy AI imagery has become, the judges will have a mammoth task going through all the entries. It might just be an interesting experiment on how we define beauty in a world where nothing is as real as it seems. That, or it’s another toxic example of how unrealistic beauty standards have become.

We would argue the latter since AI has no character or soul – the true gauge of beauty, right? Right?

[source:euronews]