Yep, it's true! Turns out, a bunch of those gorgeous faces flooding your social media feed are just products of our wild imagination.
Artificial intelligence has made its sneaky entrance into the realm of social media. With powered image generators like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, these accounts are churning out entire feeds of glamorous internet personalities that are purely fictional.
So, next time you're scrolling through those picture-perfect profiles, remember, not everything you see is what it seems!
From Futurism:
Take an account going by the name of "Milla Sofia," for instance, described as a "19-year-old virtual girl from Helsinki, Finland," who has amassed tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
Good Morning. Making memories by the crystal-clear waters of Bora Bora.#bora #borabora #sea #sun #vacationmode #gm #sundayvibes pic.twitter.com/OAIDTEtEaZ
— Milla Sofia (@AiModelMilla) June 11, 2023
Almost every one of her scantily-clad portraits showing her posing in a predictable mish-mash of holiday destinations and sandy beaches is garnering thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, and sometimes tens of thousands. Whatever the draw — the large amount of digital skin does suggest a libidinous undertone — it's clearly pulling in fans.
Sofia, whose creator didn't respond to a request for comment, isn't shy about the fact that she doesn't exist in the real world.
"I'm an AI creation," reads her Instagram bio.
Her personal website is even more perplexing, with her creator going as far as to lay out a concise résumé. For "work," she's been a fashion model and is "currently considering which brand to become a fashion ambassador and virtual influencer."
She also allegedly got a degree from the "University of Life" in "self-adaptive learning and data-driven mastery."
Put simply, we wouldn't be shocked if her creator used AI text generators to come up with this copy.
And it's not just Sofia. A simple search on Twitter shows dozens of similarly AI-generated influencers with sizable followings on social media.
It's both disturbing and fascinating how AI can generate actual "people."
Granted, if you look closely, some of these photos are clearly fake. The big giveaway is always the hands, as AI image generators are notorious for doing a poor job depicting this part of the human body.
So next time you question if a person online is really a human, just check out the hands.
