Aitana Lopez is an influencer who makes as much as $11,000 per month.
She regularly globetrots between New York City and her home in Catalonia, Spain, promotes beauty brands, Black Friday, her favorite songs and posts plenty of thirst traps.
Just don’t expect to encounter her in the airport’s first-class lounge.
That’s because despite her detailed backstory and natal chart, mapping the sky at the exact moment of her birth, the 27-year-old beauty is an AI creation.
She’s part of a new breed of digitally created avatars winning the battle for the public’s attention, joined by the likes of chart topping “singers” Solomon Ray and Breaking Rust and “blonde bombshell” Mia Zelu, who stole the show at the Wimbledon tennis tournament — even though she wasn’t physically there.
“We used to do campaigns [with humans],” said Andrea Garcia, creative director at an AI agency The Clueless, which created Aitana.
“This is different. [With humans] you have limitations based on time and how often you can redo a photo. There is no margin for error. With AI we can make changes very easily.”
What is the “right” age to get your child a smartphone? It’s a question that vexes many parents — torn between their pleading tweens and researchers who warn about the potential harms of constant connectivity. But new study findings strengthen the case for holding off.
The study, published in the journal Pediatrics on Monday, found that children who had a smartphone by age 12 were at higher risk of depression, obesity and insufficient sleep than those who did not yet have one. Researchers had analyzed data from more than 10,500 children who participated in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study — the largest long-term look at children’s brain development in the United States to date.
The younger that children under 12 were when they got their first smartphones, the study found, the greater their risk of obesity and poor sleep. The researchers also focused on a subset of children who hadn’t received a phone by age 12 and found that a year later, those who had acquired one had more harmful mental health symptoms and worse sleep than those who hadn’t.
“When you give your kid a phone, you need to think of it as something that is significant for the kid’s health — and behave accordingly,” said Dr. Ran Barzilay, lead author of the study and a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
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