Are we living in a simulation? Is this Black Mirror?
Influencers curate — or even manufacture — the lifestyle they present on Instagram, and expectations always seem to be starkly different from reality. But in the age of generative AI, it appears people don’t just have to be aware of these made-up personas, but also of made-up persons.
In the case of Emily Pellegrini, the eerie twitchy mouth movements in her videos should already give it away. That is if the blurry, glossy sheen on her photos hasn’t yet. But one shouldn’t underestimate the power of the thirst trap, as the AI model has already amassed over 200,000 Instagram followers in four months. And, according to her unnamed creator, she’s had professional athletes and billionaires slide into her DMs with flirty messages, and some have even asked her out on dates.
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Pellegrini is one of the many AI-generated models created for adult content, and her virtual life has become a lucrative venture for her anonymous creator. A Business Insider report from November revealed that Pellegrini has earned her creator close to $10,000 in just six weeks on the subscription-only platform and OnlyFans rival Fanvue. And this was money earned from her pay-per-view content and tips from her about 100 subscribers.
Unlike OnlyFans, which only allows verified creators to upload AI-enhanced or modified content, Fanvue allows creators to create entire characters from AI. Fanvue’s love for AI extends beyond its models, the platform also includes an AI message generator for chat, and voice cloning for audio notes.
“What AI is doing now is it’s allowing people to be creative, but they don’t have to be the face of that creation,” CEO Will Monange said. “Why does their audience want to interact and engage with them? Fundamentally, behind that engagement is just a creative person who is expressing themselves and knows how to do that. Whether it’s a person that sits as the face of that, or whether it’s a virtual creator, the fundamental there is still very much similar.”
These AI-generated models are created using text-to-image generators like Unstable Diffusion. But there’s still a lot of work on the part of the creators to refine and enhance the AI output to make the models look as realistic and detailed as possible.
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Not surprisingly, Pellegrini and her kind raise ethical implications and questions — what are the limits to this ‘creativity’? What laws do we have to ensure this type of tech is not used for creating deepfakes of real people?
For now, while regulations still have a lot of catching up to do, platforms like Fanvue will need to do their own policing. Monange told Insider that they’re “treading carefully” at Fanvue. He believes that AI is a way to enhance what humans can do, and not replace them completely — at least for now.
“It’s going to be more so a tool, an extension of who we are and what we do,” he said.
Pellegrini’s creator acknowledges the risks. “AI has many great things, many good tools, but it’s also very dangerous,” they said.
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