ou may have seen some recent news stories about Aitana Lopez, a pink-haired model from Barcelona who earns around £10,000 a month and has celebrities asking her out. Fair play to her, you might say, except that Aitana doesn’t exist. She’s an AI (artificial intelligence) creation, and has been made by a specialist agency in the) While the story seems new, this practice of AI or ‘fake influencers’ has been around for a while now. Many of them have hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram. As an editorial and fashion photographer, my core issue is not the effect that it’ll have on our business, as synthesised figures have been used for many, many years. In fact, those fashion houses that still use real models do so because actual people are (sadly) still cheaper to use, time-wise, than fake ones.
