First came the AI beauty pageant. Then the AI music competition. Now, there’s an award for AI Personality of the Year – perhaps the inevitable next step for the AI influencer economy as it transforms from quirky novelty to a serious and lucrative industry.
The competition, a joint venture between generic AI studio OpenArt and AI-powered creator platform Fanview, with support from AI voice company ElevenLabs, starts on Monday and runs for a month. Organizers said it aims to “celebrate the creative talent behind AI influencers” and recognize their growing business and cultural clout.
Contestants will compete for a total prize fund of $20,000, which will be divided between the overall winner and the individual categories of fitness, lifestyle, comedian, music and dance entertainer, and fictional cartoon, anime, or fantasy personality. The winners will be celebrated at an event in May that organizers are dubbing “the ‘Oscars’ for AI personalities.”
To enter, you must develop your AI Influencer on OpenArt’s platform and submit it on www.AIpersonality.ai. You will be asked for social media handles on TikTok, X, YouTube and Instagram as well as the story behind the character, your inspiration for creating it and details of any brand work.
Those evaluating the contestants include 13-time Emmy-winning comedy writer Gil Reiff, creator of Spanish AI model Aitana Lopez, and Christopher “Topper” Townsend, the MAGA rapper behind AI-generated gospel singer Solomon Ray. According to the copy of the judges’ briefing seen The VergeContestants will be scored on four criteria: quality, social impact, brand appeal and the inspiration behind the avatar. Specific points include connecting credibly with followers, keeping a constant eye on social channels, having accurate details such as “the right number of fingers and thumbs”, and having “an authentic narrative” behind the avatar.
Matt Jones, head of brand at Fanview, explained that the contest is open to established creators and novices, though existing AI influencers will still be required to submit content produced on OpenArt’s platform. The Verge.
Despite being designed to celebrate creators of virtual influencers, Jones said entrants are not required to publicly identify themselves. He said, “If someone who created this amazing piece of work doesn’t want to have anything to do with the press or doesn’t want to expose themselves or get their name out there, that’s obviously OK.” “There won’t be a need to put anyone in the spotlight here. We’ll just celebrate the work.”
It seems strange for creators to remain anonymous for a competition assessing authenticity, especially in an AI influencer ecosystem built on fictional people, fake personas, and fabricated backstories. That same anonymity has helped grifts flourish with little accountability, from AI white nationalist rapper Danny Bones to MAGA fantasy girl Jessica Foster.
This also includes persistent questions about originality, whether an AI-generated work, or even a likeness, is removed from the actual creators, and whether these tools reproduce the same old biases in synthetic form. Organizer Fanview has faced criticism for this before: In 2024, a Guardian The columnist described its “Miss AI” beauty pageant as taking “every toxic gender-based beauty norm and bundling them into a completely unrealistic package.”
For Fanview’s Jones, creators inevitably leave something of themselves in the AI characters they create. He urged creators to “lean into it”, saying, “You can’t help but contribute a little bit of yourself to the stories you tell and the characters you create.” This idea feels at home in the influencer economy: not entirely real, but a form of synthetic authenticity that the Internet already knows how to handle.
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