AI BeachBoys Story

Andrew, the first model and profile avatar of AI BeachBoys

The AI BeachBoys YouTube Channel was founded by Sydney-based photographer Mark. A well-known photographer in Australia, Mark specialises in people and fashion photography. He has been a photographer over two decades. At age 51 (in 2023), he is the oldest member of the AI BeachBoys team. The rest of the team members are half his age.

The two other photographers in the team are London-based Lance and Houston-based Randy, both of whom are in their twenties. Both Lance and Randy were attendees of a photography workshop conducted by Mark in London, which was where they were first acquainted. At that time (early 2020), the world was going into Covid-19 lockdown, but the three photographers were able to continue keeping in touch via Zoom, even though one is in Sydney, another in London and another in Houston.

In the beginning, they had intended to start a YouTube channel to showcase their people photography. That idea was kept in the backburner as none of them could provide the time to move forward, and for the next few years, the idea of starting a YouTube channel receded away while the three photographers got on with their lives.

In the winter of 2023 (or rather, summer in Sydney), Mark attended a conference on AI generated art in New York City. There, he met two young graphic artists Pete and Joey, who were running a studio at The Bronx. In addition to doing the usual graphic work using Photoshop, Pete and Joey were exploring the use of AI generators. These are softwares that could create art using either textual or image prompts.

Mark describes meeting Pete and Joey for the first time. "When I saw what these guys were doing with AI, my first thought was, 'I am out of a job!'" He was blown away but the capabilities of artificial intelligence in mimicking real life.

Pete describes Mark's visit to their loft studio in The Bronx: "The first thing he said when he got into our studio was, 'This too is New York?' Apparently, he was expected all of New York City to look like Manhattan."

Nevertheless, the meet up with Pete and Joey was very productive. Pete and Joey assured Mark that AI was not going to replace him as photographer any time soon. The technology still has a lot of grounds to cover, and in its present form, the AI artists face numerous limitations.

One way to keep photographers relevant is to use their photographs to create datasets. By feeding photos into the AI generator, the artists creates datasets of models which can then be used to generate artwork that bears the model's likeness. These are known as avatars.

Ideally, these avatars are expected to display the model's exact likeness, but in truth, the resulting avatars often show deviations and deformities. These include the length of hair and the amount of facial and chest hair. So, in the present stage, there is not yet full consistency. In addition to that, the resulting avatars often show deformities, particularly to the fingers, and often result it deformed torso and additional heads. Many of these avatars have to be discarded because they simply don't measure up to expectation.

Their discussions eventually rotate back to the idea of starting a YouTube channel, but instead of showing photographs, the channel will display only AI-generated art. Before 2023, Mark would never have imagined that his desire to start a YouTube channel would move in such a tangent, but the arrival of AI generators totally changed the landscape of people imagery.

Immediately after the meeting with Pete and Joey, Mark got in touch with Randy and Lance, asking them if they would be interested to be involved in the YouTube channel. At that point, both Randy and Lance have also just heard about AI art and were very curious about it, and at the same time, a bit concerned that it would make them redundant. But if AI is going to be the next big thing in the horizon, they both want in. So the team grew to five.

But what to call the channel and who to administer it? For much of the summer of 2023 in Sydney, the five wrestled with the idea. None of them have the time to start a YouTube channel, and none have the time to learn how to do it.

Whenever faced with an issue, Mark would go for a walk, and since Bondi Beach was closest to his home, he went for a walk there, bringing his camera along. And as it is his usual habit, whenever he come across people who are photogenic, he would approach them, asking permission to photograph them.

The first person he met that late summer afternoon was university student, whom we will call Andrew, who was at Bondi Beach with his friends. Andrew became the first person to be photographed for the channel, and his avatar also became the profile picture for AI BeachBoys. But the channel was not called AI BeachBoys in the beginning.

Fresh from his visit to Bondi Beach, Mark did a Zoom conference with Pete, Joey, Randy and Lance, and in that call, he suggested calling the channel AI Bondi Boys. All four of them opposed the idea as being "too Australian" and not sufficiently inclusive, since Randy and Lance would be contributing photos from America and Europe, while Pete and Joey would be creating the art in New York.

After some brainstorming, they settled on the name AI BeachBoys.

Right from the beginning, the five of them decided they would not want to have their real name attached to the channel. Unlike YouTubers who relish as much exposure to themselves as they could possibly garner, in this case, the three photographers approached AI art with some trepidation. Mark in particular was concerned how involvement in AI art would have on his reputation as a well-known photographer. For that reason, they want to put a distance between themselves and the channel. On the other hand, if AI art replaces traditional photography, they want to be "in" rather than left "out" in the cold.

So they assigned for themselves pseudonyms. Mark, Randy, Lance, Pete and Joey are all pseudonyms that provide them some privacy and detachment. AI BeachBoys would be a fantasy channel: a fantasy for the viewers AND for the people who created it. They want to have some ground to stand back and watch whether the channel would take off or crash land.

Now all the pieces were in place except for one. Who to run the channel?

They needed someone who has at least some basic knowledge of YouTube to run and maintain the channel. That rules out the five of them. After a few weeks of searching, they found Tim, a YouTuber in Malaysia who is willing to help them maintain their channel as a partner. He is maintaining a few channels of his own and will help the group maintain theirs.

A workflow was established where Mark, Randy and Lance would submit photos to Pete and Joey. The two artists would use the photos to create datasets from which AI artwork is then generated. Pete and Joey work on creating the videos for YouTube. These are then sent to Tim to upload.

The privacy that they have given themselves is also extended to the people they photographed. Most of these people are not professional models. They are almost always college or university students. To give these students privacy and also to protect their safety, as viewers of the avatars may mistaken them for the actual photographs, all the models are assigned stage names. So the names appearing with the avatars are not the models' actual names. This is to make it very difficult for stalkers to track the models down.

Only the photographers have direct contact with the models. The artists who create the avatars may only contact the photographers. They have never met the models themselves. Similarly the channel administrator also has no contact with the models. Comments and messages from the viewers have to pass through a channel, from the administrator to the artist, from the artist to the photographer and from the photographer to the model. This ensures the models are fully insulated.

The team never expected AI BeachBoys to grow as quickly as it did. The start was quite slow. For the first 40+ days, nobody seemed to notice the channel. And then, they managed to get one video viral, and within a short duration, the number of subscribers grew to 1000, then 5000 and then 10,000. The channel was also accepted into the YouTube Partner Program.

After AI BeachBoys channel was established, the same team decided to create another channel for girls. Initially, it was called AI Candy, but since that name was already used by many other YouTube channels, the team decided to rename it AI BeachGirls.

In the beginning, AI BeachGirls was also administered by Tim, but he quickly became overwhelmed and requested that someone else took over as the channel administrator. Lance's then fiancée Jessica volunteered to be the channel administrator for AI BeachGirls. Under Jessica's administration, AI BeachGirls grew quickly. Two of its videos went viral, and the channel was accepted into the YouTube Partner Program just a few weeks after AI BeachBoys.

On 28 October 2023, Lance and Jessica were married in London, at a ceremony attended by Mark and Randy. As this article is written (on 1 November 2023), the two of them are still on their honeymoon, but they will eventually return to their positions at AI BeachBoys and AI BeachGirls.

To this day, the group of individuals prefer to remain anonymous and detached from their creation. They prefer AI BeachBoys to be regarded as a fantasy channel, the product of their fantasy, where every named person is a pseudonym, and every image is an avatar representation rather than a photograph. The individuals involved discover the pleasure of watching their creation from this position where they are not personally identified.