Alba Renai, an attractive digital influencer (网红) powered by artificial intelligence, has recently announced that she will be hosting a special section on Spain’s popular reality show “Survivor”.

Created in the fall of last year by Be a Lion, Alba Renai quickly became a superstar online, attracting over 10,000 fans. She is a beautiful young woman, but she is not actually real.

Most people started speaking highly of Alba about her looks, wishing her luck in her new position, and most likely not even realizing she was an AI-powered avatar (化身), and some expressed their concern about such digital avatars occupying human jobs. In Asia, for example, several countries have been experimenting with Al newscasters.

Be a Lion, the company that created and trained: Alba Renai, recently claimed 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 Al experts, engineers, producers, filmmakers, and community managers. “Alba is a collaborative (协作的) work between humans and machines,” Luis Movilla, a director at Be a Lion, said. “Now humans must have certain skills to be able to operate technological advances. We have had to redevelop the educational plan of our own employees and in the labor market.”

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 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?

As the U. K. and nations across the world mourn (哀悼) the death of Queen Elizabeth II, several aspects of the queen’s 70-year reign have been resurfacing over the past few days. From her personal life to her colonial legacy to her beloved dog — many are attracted by the life of the monarch (君主) . According to some experts, part of people’s attention towards the Royal Family not only comes from their respect for the queen but also from the trend of celebrity worshipping (名人崇拜) .

The idea of the British Royal Family taps into a collective desire for something that seems extraordinary, as opposed to the banality (平庸) of one’s own life, Cheryl Thompson, an assistant professor at the School of Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University, told Global News.

Thompson said the fairytaleish aspect of the British Royal Family is what attracts people, adding that many are attracted by their luxury weddings, seemingly perfect lives and the media attention that follows. “People have grown up hearing about fairy tales with princes and kings and queens,” she said. “So, you would imagine the castle has to be amazing compared to the two-bedroom apartment that you live in with your family … that whole idea of having servants upstairs, the luxuriousness of the dinner table — just brings all of that back into people’s imagination.”

Cele Otnes, head of the Department of Business Administration at the University of Illinois, said the Royal Family is “a complex brand” that is different from what one would normally associate with celebrities.

“They are a global brand that people love all over the world”, explained Otnes.

“They’re luxury”, she said. People far and wide are “very interested in the drama and the tension that happens in the Royal Family.”

“I think another one of the reasons the queen was so popular is that although everyone knew she was extremely wealthy, she didn’t show off her wealth.”

To improve road safety and raise awareness among Russia’s notoriously (臭名昭著地) careless drivers, Russian police have tried to get drivers to slow down at zebra (斑马) crossings by having painted horses as zebras walk across on the busiest streets in some of the big cities.

The light grey horses, painted with black stripes (条纹), carried signs on their backs reading: “Careful, children are on their way to school.” The police sent the “zebras” to several different locations in the Russian capital, where officials in orange vests walked them over zebra crossings and handed out leaflets (传单) to passing drivers.

Some held up rainbow-coloured umbrellas over the painted animals to protect them from the rain. Russian roads are notoriously dangerous and drivers still rarely take steps to avoid pedestrians (行人). Nearly half of all traffic accidents in the country’s big cities are caused by cars hitting pedestrians, and a third of those occur on crossings, according to traffic police figures published last month.

In the first six months of this year, 378 people were killed and more than 6, 600 injured on pedestrian crossings in Russia, according to police. In Moscow alone, 43 people were killed, including two children.

Though police officials said that only safe paint would be used on the animals, animal rights activists still disagreed with the idea, accusing the police of “treating animals like garbage”.

“Children understand that paints are bad for animals,” the Interfax news agency quoted (引用) president of Vita animal rights group Irina Novozhilova as saying.

Let’s hope this part of the campaign is over and animals are left out of future attempts to raise pedestrians’ awareness.