Formula E Team Fires Its AI-Generated Influencer after Fans Balk

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It's no secret that it's difficult for women to gain traction in motorsports, whether it's as a driver (fewer than 5 percent of elite-level pilots identify as female), or as an engineer or racing team member (between 10 percent and 20 percent in a top series like Formula 1). This week, Formula E team Mahindra underscored this gap by launching something it called "Ava Beyond Reality," an artificially created, female-presenting "AI Ambassador" that was met with such negativity from the team's fanbase that the entire program was wiped from the Internet in less than 48 hours.

Is racing is so uninterested in welcoming women onto pit lane that it will literally create an artificial person entirely out of computer code in order to avoid hiring a living, breathing woman? That was the overwhelming tone of the outcry from both Formula E fans and motorsports enthusiasts worldwide when confronted with the (now-deleted) Instagram profile belonging to "Ava Rose," a synthetic creation described as a "Sustainable Tech Queen" and "Racing Rebel Robot."

The fauxfluencer's profile page consisted almost entirely of lifestyle-y, heavily filtered selfies of a conventionally attractive youngish woman, paired with bland captions on topics as generic as they were distant from Formula E: shoes, self-care, and how important it is to get restful sleep and "recharge the mind, the body, and the soul" (three things that this artificial marketing-machina did not possess). Entirely absent were any discussion of Ava Rose's ostensible role in promoting Mahindra's sustainability efforts, nor indeed any clues as to its association with racing at all aside from a single track-side snapshot where the digital avatar was wearing a team-branded lanyard.

If all of the above comes across as an icky use of technology that amplifies the misogyny that permeates motorsports, where women have in the past been reduced to ornamental roles as a visual side show to the actual on-track action, consider for a moment the shocking possibility that the entire plan may have been to actually... appeal to female fans?

"The photographs—shoes, clothing, selfies—seem drawn from the same kind of influencer-style sponsored content theme so common from accounts that advertise towards women, in this case paired with your standard 'AI girlfriend' imagery," said Hazel Southwell, long-time Formula E correspondent. "And yet, the text that accompanies them doesn't appeal to women at all. It feels very much like some type of outside marketing agency deal gone terrible wrong."