First got here the AI magnificence pageant. Then the AI music contests. Now, there may be an award for AI Character of the 12 months — maybe the inevitable subsequent step for the AI influencer economic system because it transforms from quirky novelty right into a severe and profitable trade.
The competition, a three way partnership between generative AI studio OpenArt and AI-powered creator platform Fanvue, with backing from AI voice firm ElevenLabs, opens on Monday and runs for a month. The organizers mentioned it’s meant to “have a good time the artistic expertise ‘behind’ AI Influencers” and acknowledge their rising industrial and cultural clout.
Contestants will compete for a complete prize fund of $20,000, which can be break up between an general winner and particular person classes of health, life-style, comic, music and dance entertainer, and fictional cartoon, anime, or fantasy persona. Victors can be celebrated at an occasion in Might that the organizers are dubbing the “‘Oscars’ for AI personalities.”
To enter, you have to develop your AI influencer on OpenArt’s platform and submit it at www.AIpersonality.ai. You’ll be requested for social media handles throughout TikTok, X, YouTube, and Instagram, in addition to the story behind the character, your motivations for creating it, and particulars of any model work.
Amongst these assessing contestants are 13‑time Emmy‑profitable comedy author Gil Rief, the creators of Spanish AI mannequin Aitana Lopez, and Christopher “Topher” Townsend, the MAGA rapper behind AI-generated gospel singer Solomon Ray. In keeping with a replica of the judges’ briefing seen by The Verge, contestants can be scored on 4 standards: high quality, social clout, model enchantment, and the inspiration behind the avatar. Particular factors embrace reliably partaking with followers, portraying a constant look throughout social channels, correct particulars like having the “proper variety of fingers and thumbs,” and having “an genuine narrative” behind the avatar.
The competition is open to established creators and novices alike, although present AI influencers will nonetheless have to submit materials produced on OpenArt’s platform, Matt Jones, head of name at Fanvue, informed The Verge.
Regardless of being designed to have a good time creators of digital influencers, Jones mentioned that entrants don’t have to publicly determine themselves. “If an individual who created this superb piece of labor desires nothing to do with the press or to reveal themselves or to have their title on the market, that’s clearly superb,” he mentioned. “There can be no have to thrust anyone into the limelight right here. We’d simply have a good time the piece of labor.”
That creators can stay nameless feels odd for a contest judging authenticity, significantly in an AI influencer ecosystem constructed on fictional individuals, faux personas, and fabricated backstories. That very same anonymity has additionally helped grifts flourish with little accountability, from the AI white nationalist rapper Danny Bones to MAGA fantasy lady Jessica Foster.
There’s acquainted baggage too, together with persistent questions on originality, whether or not AI-generated work, or perhaps a likeness, has been lifted from actual creators, and whether or not these instruments merely reproduce the identical previous biases in artificial kind. Organizer Fanvue has already confronted criticism for this up to now: in 2024, a Guardian columnist described its “Miss AI” magnificence pageant as one thing that “take(s) each poisonous gendered magnificence norm and bundle(s) them up into a very unrealistic bundle.”
To Fanvue’s Jones, creators inevitably depart one thing of themselves within the AI characters they make. “You’ll be able to’t assist however put somewhat little bit of your self into the tales that you just inform and the characters that you just make,” he mentioned, urging creators to “lean into that.” The thought feels at dwelling within the influencer economic system: not strictly actual, however a type of artificial authenticity the web already is aware of learn how to deal with.
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