James lives in Kenya, has nearly 250.000 followers on TikTok, and has a very 21st-century problem: people don’t believe he’s real.
He was born with six fingers on each hand. And in the age of images made with artificial intelligence, where hands with extra fingers are the genre’s most famous mistake, that was enough for people to accuse him of being a digital fraud. His response became almost a slogan: “I’m not AI, I’m a real guy”.
Well, one beer brand was listening. Windhoek, together with the agency TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, hired him as its new hand model. The very thing that had made everyone suspicious became the reason to choose him. They took him outside Kenya for the first time, all the way to Johannesburg, to shoot a tongue-in-cheek documentary about his life, and the brand put its promise in writing: no ads featuring AI-generated people or beer.
Who would have thought that the biggest flaw in artificial intelligence would end up being the hardest-to-forge certificate of authenticity.