In its sixteenth season, RuPaul’s Drag Race has become an internationally renowned competition, where the best Drag (an artist who adopts an extravagant or parodic female character, with glamorous and exaggerated costumes and makeup) fight to win in a highly-rated program.
Well, now there is a new contest taking place on social media, it’s called AI Drag Race and it’s nothing more than artificial intelligence doing its thing.
In the recent season finale of Instagram account, Miss Piggy, with a drag look generated by AI, faced her lover turned rival Kermisha Ihman, who sported a thick 12-centimeter ponytail on her green felt head.
AI Drag Race is just one of the increasingly numerous AI-generated accounts that appear on Instagram and TikTok, with creators who not only pit their favorite fictional characters against each other in seasons that aim to mimic the original show, but also create and generate their own queens.
There is AI Horror Drag Race, which pits characters like Pennywise and Billy the Puppet against Ghostface from Scream. There is also Big Girl’s Drag Race, exclusive for curvy characters.
Some accounts subject their participants to typical Drag Race challenges, such as Snatch Game and commercial shoots; others not only create the runway looks for the contestants, but also their everyday street looks for work photos or interviews.
Is it legal to create this content?
They also operate in a kind of gray area of copyright. Drag Race, Miss Piggy, and Pennywise all have stakeholders. The creators behind the different accounts claim that what they do is parody, or that it falls within the fair use doctrine of the Intellectual Property Law, which stipulates that “transformative” works are protected.
Beyond that, however, there are questions about whether AI should be able to generate an image of, for example, Homer Simpson in a showgirl costume. Someday, a court could decide that AI models cannot be trained on copyrighted characters or generate results that depict them, says James Grimmelmann, professor of digital law and information at Cornell University.
“I think it would be a loss for culture, but it is also something that could be consistent with current copyright law,” adds Grimmelmann. “Right now we are in a period of legal uncertainty.”
