When Synthetic Beauty Becomes a Business Model

Part IV — The Perfect (Hu- Wo)Man Who Does Not Exist

When Synthetic Beauty Becomes a Business Model

Social media increasingly shows us people we never seem to encounter in real life. Perfect faces, perfect bodies, perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect light. Scroll through Instagram for long enough and an interesting question arises: where are all these people in the real world?

Some of them really are exceptionally beautiful people with exceptionally good photographers. But increasingly, there is another possible explanation: some of them may not exist at all.

Idealised beauty is nothing new. Fashion magazines have been selling it for decades. Models are selected because they are exceptional; photographs are professionally styled, lit, edited and retouched. But underneath all that perfection, there was still a human being.

Generative Artificial Intelligence changes that. We can now create the face itself: the jawline, eyes, body, hair and age. We can give that person a name, occupation and biography, put him in an expensive suit, let him drink coffee in Milan, drive through Monaco and look thoughtfully into the distance. Post often enough and we no longer have an attractive image. We have what appears to be a person.

What exactly are we following?

If 100,000 people follow a synthetic man on Instagram, what exactly are they following? A fictional character, a model, a digital artwork, a brand, an advertising vehicle — or a commercial product designed to trigger responses we normally reserve for another human being?

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. We happily watch fictional characters in films. The difference is that we understand the agreement: this is fiction.

Social media works differently. A profile looks like a person. It has a name, photographs, followers and a “life”. It may answer comments and recommend products. Human beings respond through exactly the same interface they use for friends, colleagues and real strangers. The distinction between character and person becomes much less obvious.

And synthetic beauty has another characteristic: it is programmable. The creator can make the person younger, taller, leaner, more muscular, more symmetrical or simply more attractive. A synthetic model does not age unless its creator wants it to. It never wakes up tired, has a bad skin day or needs to be in Milan to be photographed in Milan.

The perfect person has become scalable.

Research suggests that the distinction between real and virtual beauty does not necessarily protect us psychologically. A 2026 experimental study involving 303 adult women found that exposure to both human and virtual influencers increased appearance dissatisfaction compared with a control condition, with no significant difference between the human and virtual influencers.

The issue is not limited to women. A real man looking at the same feed may see apparently perfect men receiving enormous amounts of attention and conclude that this is the competition. Social-media engagement tells us very little about what women or men actually seek in real relationships, but it does contribute to the visual environment in which people evaluate themselves and others.

We are therefore moving beyond comparing ourselves with unusually attractive real people. We may increasingly be comparing ourselves with optimised humans who were never human in the first place.

When fantasy becomes commerce

Then money enters the picture. Followers, views and attention have commercial value. A synthetic persona can promote clothes, hotels, cosmetics, cars or lifestyles without the beautiful human apparently presenting those products ever having existed.

That is not automatically deceptive or unlawful. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for example, does not prohibit AI avatars or virtual influencers as such. But it does recognise that their use can become deceptive depending on the circumstances, and US rules also address fake indicators of social-media influence.

The more useful question is therefore not “Are synthetic influencers allowed?” but “Does the audience understand what it is looking at?”

Europe is already moving towards greater transparency. Article 50 of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act contains requirements concerning certain AI-generated or manipulated content, while platforms including 

Meta increasingly label AI-generated material.

But that leaves a fascinating problem.

We label the image. What about the person?

One photograph may be AI-generated. Another may combine a real photograph with generative editing. A third may be completely synthetic. Yet someone visiting the profile has a much simpler question:

Does this person exist?

The deception — where deception actually occurs — may therefore not lie in any individual image. It may lie in the identity created by all those images together.

JAS Aware Solution: label the identity, not only the content

Perhaps we need another layer of transparency. Not a ban. Not compulsory publication of passports. Not the end of pseudonyms, avatars or fictional characters.

Simply tell users when the apparently human identity itself is synthetic.

SYNTHETIC PERSONA — This profile depicts a digitally created person.

The character can still be beautiful. It can have millions of followers. Brands can work with it and artists can create it. Nothing needs to disappear.

But the information asymmetry does.

The problem is not fantasy. The problem begins when fantasy borrows the credibility of reality without telling us that it is fantasy.

For decades, advertising sold us idealised people. Artificial Intelligence introduces something fundamentally different:

the idealised person no longer needs to exist.

And perhaps that is perfectly acceptable.

As long as we know.

The fundamental legal question is not whether AI was used, but whether the recipient was materially misled about the nature of the entity with whom they were interacting.

JAS — Aware Solutions

Research. Analysis. Practical solutions.