Exclusive:
Olivia C is an artificial intelligence-forged Instagram influencer who appears to jet off around the world for free – but in reality is the fictional product of a money-savvy couple who’ve now quit their jobs
If you thought artificial intelligence was just about ChatGPT and robots ‘taking over the world’, think again. A money-savvy couple have now quit their jobs after creating a completely fake social media model – and they claim she’s paying their wages.
Olivia C is an eerily ultra-realistic influencer created entirely using artificial intelligence (AI). Her Instagram ‘@oliviaisflyinghigh ‘ depicts the life of an avid traveller, taking effortless-seeming ‘snaps’ in countries all over the world including Portugal, Peru and even the UK.
But behind the seemingly carefree lifestyle is a duo working relentlessly to bring ‘Olivia C’ to life. This includes married couple Alvero, 42, and Rita, 34, who’ve now formed creative agency Falamusa, after 20 years in the advertising industry.
“Oliva is like an informal fun experience to test the technology,” Alvero said in an exclusive interview with The Mirror. “We saw it was a trend, we thought: ‘let’s see if we can do better, let’s see if we can make it really believable, let’s see how people react to it, let’s just gather some insights’.
“Artificial intelligence people are talking about and speculating and making some fantasies that it’s going to replace us, destroy us and the world. So, we thought let’s work with it and try to find out what it does… Things are going really fast, it’s very, very motivating – we are discovering real-world applications of the technology.”
While Alvero works more on the marketing side of Olivia C, Rita brings together her appearance using a number of new technologies like Luma AI and Midjourney. Olivia C’s lifelike social media snaps are what earned her third place in the world’s first AI-generated beauty pageant (WAICAs) that took place earlier this year.
Dubbed as the world’s ‘tech Oscars’ this saw entirely fake models judged on their appearance, technicalities and social media clout in an online event. It comes at a time when ‘brands are increasingly turning to AI-generated models’ for marketing products due to their lower cost and increased time efficiency, according to SpringerNature.
Imagine Education – a coaching platform for AI creators – has also reportedly seen a ‘360% jump in sign-ups’ in the past month alone. The platform offers courses on the ‘required skills to build your own AI influencer’, which its spokespeople suggest is the perfect solution for those ‘who don’t want to be public facing creators’ but still want to ‘leverage the influencer lifestyle’.
Unsurprisingly, this has raised some crucial questions, with countless onlookers questioning whether AI-generated models perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards or will eventually replace ‘real-life’ models. Although it’s a complex topic, Alvero asserts there is too much scaremongering around this.
Like the world-famous characters of Mickey Mouse or Lara Croft, he insists that Olivia C is all about creating an intriguing fictional persona – though, she does bear some resemblance to his wife. Alvero continued: “The first time Rita appeared to some of my friends who didn’t know her they said: ‘She kind of looks like Olivia.’ She has freckles like Olivia, she is very pale like Olivia.
“But we created a personality – adventurous, curious – a bit like us. We travel a lot, we have a daughter and we live one month in Spain and the next we go to Sardinia and stay like two months there. We like to travel a lot, so Olivia has that feeling, she’s very adventurous but at the same time she’s indulgent.
“She likes the good things of life like good wine, sometimes a good dress… sometimes she’s reading an unknown reader from Peru…We wanted a human being girl, she looks like this and that’s it.” He later added: “We didn’t question it, I know there are people that are talking about real beauty issues and the impact but it’s not our goal.”
Alvero doesn’t exactly know what the future looks like for Olivia C, but he and Rita are determined to use her for good. He’s also especially interested to work with production companies and even education programmes to see how AI can be implemented in a creative way.
He went on: “History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. We’ve always seen that in history I guess from fire. You know ‘oh fire it will burn everything’, no but it’s great for making food.
“Or photography – ‘oh what will happen to painting with photography?’ Well, it opened the view for other artistic movements like futurism and cubism.
“There’s always a shock and then an integration. I believe that’s the same thing. Of course, there’s a huge topic about implications [of AI] in a lot of places socially, politically – a lot of things. But I think that always happens… Of course it will be very impactful, it will change a lot of things, but that’s the way things have been going for centuries.”
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