"Across social media, an influx of A.I.-generated avatars is reshaping what it means to be an influencer. A Facebook group called Baddies in AI, geared toward women who are using A.I. to either augment their own social-media presence or create entirely new figures from scratch, has more than three hundred thousand members. In one post, a Black woman named Whitney shared A.I.-generated images of a white woman drinking iced coffee in a sunny apartment with blond-wood flooring. “Okay yall I’m going undercover,” she wrote. “May the odds be in my favor.” In the comments, one member jokingly called it “whitefishing.” Whitney mentioned that she’d already tried the approach on LinkedIn, uploading a white avatar but keeping all the other details—her name, experience, and posts—the same. “Recruiter outreach and post circulation jumped,” she wrote. “So for me it’s a data proven experiment, not self-hate.”
Ryan Milner, a professor of communication at the College of Charleston, told me that A.I. avatars seemed less like a rupture and more of a clarification. “One of the liberatory potentials of the internet was that you could divorce the mind from the body, and so the utopian read was that things would become more of a meritocracy where disability or race or other social hindrances wouldn’t get in the way. We would just be our intellects and be measured by that,” he said. But, with the advent of platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, the online self became highly saleable. “The internet has gone from a text-based medium to a visual one over the last two decades,” Milner said. “It’s not surprising that when people are playing with identity online in the age of A.I., that we’re still going to see the norms replicated. The tools aren’t changing that.”"
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/with-ai-anyone-can-be-an-influencer
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