Share and Follow
Meet Aitana Lopez, a digital influencer raking in up to $11,000 monthly.
From jet-setting between New York City and her native Catalonia in Spain, she promotes beauty lines, Black Friday deals, and her favorite tunes, all while sharing eye-catching content.
However, you won’t find her lounging in any airport’s first-class area.
Despite her intricate backstory and a meticulously crafted natal chart, aligning with the stars at her “birth,” Aitana, at 27 years old, is a creation of artificial intelligence.
She is part of a rapidly growing group of virtual avatars captivating audiences, alongside virtual “musicians” Solomon Ray and Breaking Rust, and the “blonde bombshell” Mia Zelu, who caused a stir at a Wimbledon event without being physically present.
“We used to do campaigns [with humans],” said Andrea Garcia, creative director at an AI agency The Clueless, which created Aitana.
“This is different. [With humans] you have limitations based on time and how often you can redo a photo. There is no margin for error. With AI we can make changes very easily.”
After all, AI creations never have a bad hair day, miss a note when recording, are always on time, never complain and never get caught in the kind of messy scandals humans are prone to.
Aitana has made promo videos for Amazon, while huge global brands such as Calvin Klein, Prada, Samsung and YouTube have all used AI influencers.
Garcia points out that her agency invested serious time and capital into Aitana, who was “birthed” through a proprietary software program they developed.
“We enter all kinds of information about her,” she told The Post. “We put in details about her childhood, what she likes to do during free time, favorite movies, her nemeses when she was little.
“Her favorite food is pizza and her first concert was to see an orchestra. Her father likes classical music.”
It also takes time, skill and intelligence both artificial and human to create the photos and digital videos which appear on Aitana’s stream, where she looks almost real enough to be a flesh and blood human.
Sometime in December it’s expected Aitana will be able to hold five-minute conversations with fans, who will, of course, have to pay to chat with her via a platform called Fanvue.
Garcia is as protective of Aitana as she is real life influencers. “She feels like a friend but even more like a daughter,” she added.
Agencies who make these digital personalities argue their creations are no different to cartoon characters or superheroes who have been prevalent in society for decades, and nobody questions them, so what’s the big deal?
In the music industry, AI artists are taking off, whether most of the listeners realize they’re real or not.
AI generated Christian recording artist Solomon Ray topped the Billboard gospel charts with his song “Find Your Rest.” He’s cleverly billed as a “Mississippi-made soul singer,” and has over 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, where he even sports a blue “verified artist” tick.
Forrest Frank, who had a number one Christian hit of his own, pointed out on social media how “AI does not have the Holy Spirit inside of it. So, I think it’s really weird to be opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.” On the upside for Ray, at least he could not have been emotionally hurt by that comment.
Similarly, AI generated singer Breaking Rust ascended the county and western charts, causing outrage — particularly for breaking into a genre which prides itself on authenticity.
Human singer Breland described the ascent as “absolutely a bad sign for the future of music … [and] a concern for everyone in the music industry.”
However, fans vote with their ears, and appear to show very little concern.
Other projects are starting to blur the lines between reality and the artificial world even more.
Mia Zelu generated a lot of press with her striking Wimbledon Center Court photo, apparently duping a cricket star, and plenty of her 218,000 followers. Her pictures are all very realistic with the only obvious clue she’s not real being her description as a “Digital Storyteller & Influencer-AI.”
She even posts comments describing her feelings with typos, such as a picture on a rainy night captioned: “There’s something about rainy nights here that feels so familiar. Aaaand yes i got a could.”
One of the most followed AI influencers, Lil Miquela, caused serious backlash when she posted about being diagnosed with leukemia. It may have been orchestrated, at least partially, in a bid to humanize her — but flipped out bonafide humans.
A typical response read: “This is so gross, especially for ppl actually struggling with cancer.”
The post was a sponsored partnership with a bone marrow donation organization called NMDP.
In a response to People magazine, NMDP’s Senior Vice President for Strategy & Innovation, Erica Jensen, tried to justify the project.
She wrote, “By introducing a fictional and scientifically accurate diagnosis into social feeds, NMDP reached a younger generation while protecting real patients from additional emotional or physical burden.”
However, unlike humans diagnosed with life-threatening conditions, Lil Miquela will be OK.
Hollywood has played a key role in the development of the technology which creates AI generated characters, through its innovations in digital animation and Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI).
However, the introduction of one computer generated personality, Tilly Norwood — engineered, for some reason, to have a more British name than is possible in the real world — also caught major flack.
Partly as she was unveiled at the Zurich film festival by her creator Eline Van der Velden, who described her as “the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman.”
Actors and unions immediately fought back against the “scary” character and bemoaned her “stealing away human connection.”
Van der Velden has defended herself, posting online, “Creating Tilly has been, for me, an act of imagination and craftsmanship, not unlike drawing a character, writing a role or shaping a performance.”
Tilly’s online account now has a number of disclaimers making it clear she is an AI project.
Madeline Salazar, a human content creator who discusses AI and posts as ImMadSal, finds it all overblown.
“I think it’s an unrealistic threat that an AI actress would star in a movie alongside human stars,” she told The Post. “They may take the place of background actors, but I view AI as a kind of animation. People were being overly dramatic”
Salazar is one of the first people to test out a conversation with Aitana. During that, she asked if humans should be worried.
“We’re not competitors, we’re a dream team,” Aitana replied.
However, she ominously added: “But I’ll say this: If you block me, I might go into revenge glitch mode,” indicating a shade of jealousy all-too humanistic for many.
