Inside the world’s largest AI personality contest: Are virtual influencers the future?

By Roselyne Min Published on 25/05/2026 - 15:12 GMT+2 Share Comments Share Facebook Twitter Flipboard Send Reddit Linkedin Messenger Telegram VK Bluesky Threads Whatsapp

Body positivity nightmare or a chance to redefine beauty standards? A new awards contest for AI-generated personalities is testing how far virtual influencers can go.

Thousands of AI-generated “personalities” are competing in a new global awards programme that organisers say is the largest contest of its kind.

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The AI Personality of the Year Awards, co-organised by AI creation platform OpenArt and creator subscription platform Fanvue, asked participants to build, post and grow virtual characters across categories including entertainment, lifestyle, comedy, fitness, and anime, cartoon or fantasy personas.

The competition ran over several weeks, with entrants required to publish at least four posts during the challenge period. Winners will be announced this month, according to OpenArt.

“We saw an incredible response, around 3,300 total submissions,” Chloe Fang, OpenArt’s head of partnerships, told Euronews Next. She added that the awards would offer more than $90,000 (about €76,000) in prizes and gifts.

Organisers describe it as the largest competition dedicated specifically to AI personalities, a field they say is becoming increasingly mainstream.

Over the past 18 months, AI-generated personalities have embedded themselves into popular culture, building loyal fanbases and landing major brand deals, according to organisers.

While the winners have not yet been announced, one of the contest’s most-followed entrants, according to information shared by organisers, is Jae Young Joon, an AI-generated Korean male model persona with more than 400,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok.

Jae's profile clearly states that he is AI-generated, but according to organisers, fans still send heartfelt messages and love letters.

The account is run by Luc Thierry, a Canadian creator. Thierry's takeaway, organisers said, is that audiences may care less about whether a persona is real than whether the emotional connection feels real.

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Criticism about AI-generated images of humans

That blurring of reality and fiction is also what makes AI personalities ethically complicated.

Generative AI has already sparked concerns about job security, copyright and deepfake pornography.

In January, Elon Musk's xAI chatbot Grok faced scrutiny over users repeatedly generating sexually explicit images of women and minors. This prompted X to restrict some of Grok’s image-generation features and added to wider concerns about how quickly AI tools can be used to create intimate images without consent.

Meanwhile, critics say AI image generation risks pushing unrealistic body images, which social media has been criticised for promoting for years, even further. The “perfect” influencer no longer needs lighting, genetics, cosmetic procedures, filters or even a physical body.

Research has suggested that even neutral prompts can produce highly skewed results. A 2026 study by the University of Toronto, Canada, found that AI image generators disproportionately created young, white and, in the case of women, thin people with symmetrical features and blemish-free skin.

The criticism is not entirely new for Fanvue. Last year, the platform co-organised what it described as the world's first AI beauty pageant, Miss AI, which attracted criticism over whether synthetic contestants could reinforce narrow and unrealistic standards of attractiveness rather than diversify them.

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However, Fang said the awards are not judged primarily on appearance but on quality, inspiration, brand appeal and fan engagement.

Fang said early AI influencers were often associated with “pretty ladies on Instagram”, but that submissions now include music-related personas, entertainment characters, fantasy figures, male AI personalities and creators building around LGBTQ+ and cultural representation.

She also said OpenArt and Fanvue had put guardrails in place. On the platform side, OpenArt uses tools intended to identify potential copyright risks and harmful content, and submissions are reviewed by humans on the competition side.

"Our guidelines prohibit hate speech, harassment, and sexually explicit content," Fang said.

OpenArt also said participants came from diverse backgrounds, which organisers believe reflects a broad range of perspectives entering the space. According to OpenArt, 37% of creators came from Europe and the UK, around 30% from North America, 18% from Asia, 5% from Latin America, 4% from Africa and 4% from the Middle East.

However, those figures refer to the human creators behind the submissions. Organisers did not provide Euronews Next with demographic data on the AI personalities themselves.

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