Created in the fall of last year by Be a Lion, a subsidiary of television giant Mediaset Spain, Alba Renai quickly became an Instagram celebrity, attracting over 10,000 fans on Instagram. She is a beautiful young woman, only she is not actually real, but the result of AI-powered image generation based on the results of a focus group of 350 young adults who were asked about the physical and personality attributes they find most important, and the team at Be a Lion used this data to create an avatar that would appeal to as many people as possible. But what really catapulted Alba Renai into the public eye was the news that she would be hosting a special segment on Spain's version of 'Survivor.'
A couple of weeks ago, Alba took to Instagram and TikTok to let the world know that she would soon be appearing on the Spanish TV channel Telecinco and on social media as part of a special segment called "Super Secretos con Alba Renai" where she would share all sorts of exclusive content on the various Survivor contestants.
The announcement video is only a few seconds long, but it quickly went viral, garnering all sorts of reactions. Most people started complimenting Alba on her looks, wishing her luck in the new endeavor, and most likely not even realizing she was an AI-powered avatar, and some expressed their concern about other such digital avatars encroaching on human jobs. In Asia, for example, several countries have been experimenting with AI newscasters.
Be a Lion, the company that created and trained Alba Renai, recently came out to clarify that their avatar didn't steal any human jobs, on the contrary, it actually created more jobs. A team of 32 people works directly on the Alba project, including AI experts, engineers, producers, filmmakers, and community managers, and there is apparently no side of Alba that isn't moderated by humans.
"Alba is a collaborative work between humans and machines," Luis Movilla, director of Branded Content & Experience at Be a Lion, told El Pais. "Now humans must have certain skills to be able to operate technological advances. "We have had to reformulate the educational plan of our own employees and in the labor market we have looked for people who are experts in these innovation projects with skills other than the usual ones."
Alba Renai is one of several virtual influencers to attract international attention in the last few months, alongside Aitana Lopez and Lexi Love, to name just a couple of the most popular ones, but there is an entire wave of AI-powered avatars and news anchors being developed as a way to cut costs. They may not be mainstream yet, but with technology evolving at such a rapid pace, who knows where we'll be in a couple of years?
