First “Miss AI” contest sparks ire for pushing unrealistic beauty standards

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of “Miss AI” award winner “Kenza Layli” (left) and an unidentified AI-generated woman beside her. (credit: Kenza.Layli / Instagram)

An influencer platform called Fanvue recently announced the results of its first “Miss AI” pageant, which sought to judge AI-generated social media influencers and also doubled as a convenient publicity stunt. The “winner” is a fictional Instagram influencer from Morocco named Kenza Layli with more than 200,000 followers, but the pageant is already attracting criticism from women in the AI space.

“Yet another stepping stone on the road to objectifying women with AI,” Hugging Face AI researcher Dr. Sasha Luccioni told Ars Technica. “As a woman working in this field, I’m unsurprised but disappointed.”

Instances of AI-generated Instagram influencers have reportedly been on the rise since freely available image synthesis tools like Stable Diffusion have made it easy to generate an unlimited quantity of provocative images of women on demand. And techniques like Dreambooth allow fine-tuning an AI model on a specific subject (including an AI-generated one) to place it in different settings.