This is me (left). My age shows, my hair looks like a furry accident and I never really mastered the art of applying makeup. I like how I look: it is me. I love this portrait.
Last week I used this image to generate some content, testing a little tool. The video I generated is 5 seconds long. It was a shocker. Most of all because it was just stupid, as is most genAI content. (I chose the option to generate a video of me holding a gun, why is that even an option?) But thinking about it I realised it shows a deeper problem. My skin is smoothed over, my eyes are bigger, my hair is neater.
All genAI images have an uncanny perfection. Usually they show pretty, young, white girls, and if they feature someone else these people are -without exception- handsome. Never a bent back, never a pimple, never overweight, never awful teeth, never thin lips, never a sagging neck.
How come? Trust Reddit to know the answer:
- Because it’s probably been trained on millions of selfies on social media where lots of women will go for this sort of look with makeup and Instagram filters.
- And they probably only fed it photos that got at least X upvotes.. aka the ones with more attractive people were more likely to make it into that group.
And the most disturbing one:
- On a strange way, this is real beauty by your argument, haha. It’s the democracy version of beauty lol.
Wrinkles, messy hair and minimal makeup are not shared online. In the online world they are not our democratic version of beauty. Because good sources lack, the dream of genAI ever producing real-ish stuff will forever be -well- a dream.
But the worst part of my awful little movie is the endframe. When I hold the gun my eyes are almost twice their size and I look ecstatic! Holding a gun is obviously fun in the big genAI database.
Freestyling on the beauty statement: On a strange way, this is how we really feel about guns. It’s the democracy version of it.
It shows a messy messy world.
(Original photo Shot By Ari.)