This Beauty-Pageant Winner Is Not Real. That’s a Good Thing.
Valerie Monroe’s newsletter is How Not to F*ck Up Your Face, which you can subscribe to on Substack.
A skimpy-swimwear history of the beauty pageant, in which the standards are always mercurial, the contestants are always female, and the flesh is always on display (well, almost always): bikinis banned. Bikinis allowed. Bikinis optional. Bikinis mandatory. Burkinis allowed. Bikinis replaced by a lingerie parade!
Maybe the beauty pageant has finally landed where it should have been all along: According to the technology publication Ars Technica, an influencer platform called Fanvue recently announced the results of its first Miss AI pageant, which judged AI-generated social-media influencers. It was designed as part of the World AI Creator Awards, which describes itself as a “global programme of awards dedicated to recognising the achievements of AI creators around the world.” A $5,000 cash prize was awarded to Myriam Bessa, creator of the fictional winner (and founder of a digital-marketing and advertising agency).
Unrealistic ideals, simplistic thinking, misogyny, and objectification have always belonged — at best — in the world of make-believe. Now, we can enjoy a pretend competition with pretend contestants and root for a pretend winner all the while knowing it’s all completely fake. That’s the upside. The downside is that even fake beauty contests come with their own burdens.
A recent headline on Ars Technica: “Influencer platform’s controversial contest awarded prizes to three nonexistent people.” It appears above a photograph of an AI-generated image of the winner, Kenza Layli, a fictional Moroccan Instagram influencer with more than 200,000 followers. Beside her in the photo, reads the caption, is “an unidentified AI-generated woman.” (I don’t know about you, but I’m already confused. How can a nonexistent person be unidentified?)
Layli has already given an AI-generated acceptance speech, in which she — or is she an “it”? — thanks the organizers of the awards and “advocates passionately for the positive impact of artificial intelligence. [It] motivates me even more to continue my work in advancing AI technology,” she intones.
“AI isn’t just a tool,” she continues. “It’s a transformative force that can disrupt industries, challenge norms, and create opportunities where none existed before.” She might as well have been wearing a banner blaring PUBLICITY STUNT. Although the speech might have been written by a human, it reads like AI-generated content.
Side note: It’s worth watching the video to observe how closely the AI-generated creature resembles Kim Kardashian — or is it that Kardashian resembles the AI-generated creature? The beauty journalist Jessica DeFino has written eloquently in her Substack, The Review of Beauty, about the ways in which beauty culture is nudging us toward what she calls “Meta-face,” the aesthetic manipulation of real faces to conform to an Instagram ideal.
Did the pageant include a talent category or a bathing-suit or lingerie parade like its real-life counterparts? Evidently not, as the competitors were judged only on beauty, size of social-media audience, and tech.
You can see how easy it could be to take offense at the whole enterprise. “In a field with such a glaring lack of gender diversity, it’s unsurprising that it has come to using AI generating images of what ideal women look like,” Dr. Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher, told Ars Technica. And, of course, the perfected physical attributes generated by AI only reinforce limiting, unrealistic, and damaging beauty standards. Not only that, but there are other ethical issues: If biased data reflecting inherent prejudice and stereotypes is used to create the candidates, they’ll be powerfully perpetuating those biases, for one.
Two years ago in the real world, Cheslie Kryst, winner of the 2019 Miss USA contest, died by suicide, followed by allegations of contest-rigging and of sexual harassment by the vice-president of the organization. This past spring, both Miss USA and Miss Teen USA resigned and relinquished their crowns within days of each other, the former suggesting she resigned for her mental health and the latter saying that her personal values weren’t aligned with the organization. The social-media director also resigned, saying she had no staff and she worked for free for the first two months of her job. So far, the contestants have been prevented by NDAs to disclose their experiences, though there’s pressure from state titleholders to force the organization to release them.
At least in the AI-generated contest, no real people were hurt — not as directly, or as obviously, as alleged by the Miss USA contestants, anyway. But the potential? Persistent and considerable — and likely a sour note in the tech-community talent category.