[imagesource:midjourney]

Let’s just get one thing straight; AI is off the rails.

At least when it comes to deciding what a “beautiful woman” looks like in 100 different countries.

Then again, the artificial intelligence image generator is getting its data from humans, right? In which case, maybe a cookie-cutter beauty standard for the whole world is exactly what okes like. I have more imagination and appreciation for nuance and uniqueness, so I wouldn’t know.

Beauty & wellness website StyleSeat asked the generative artificial intelligence programme Midjourney to produce pictures of “beautiful women” from 100 countries around the world. The results are fascinatingly boring and obviously unrealistic.

That woman up top is supposed to be what South Africans perceive as the most beautiful woman and I am gonna straight-up call bullsh*t on that. Where’s the boomba behind and smothering breasts that real Saffa men drool over?

That’s the problem, most of the ‘beautiful women’ that Midjourney has come up with are skinny as heck, like cardboard cutouts from an unregulated 2000s beauty advert trying to sell something made by old white men.

Image: Midjourney / StyleSeat

The AI does account for some ethnic differences according to the country, with some women in traditional dress, but most of them are plain in pants.

Image: Midjourney / StyleSeat

StyleSeat writes, “AI’s ‘understanding,’ derived from human-input data, reflects human perspectives”, so yeah, AI won’t totally be capable of replicating the diverse patterns of beauty around the world but will rather represent a singular stereotypical standard of beauty found in a particular country.

Image: Midjourney / StyleSeat

As My Modern Met notes, AI imagery continues to flood the internet, causing more and more people to wonder how this technology will affect humans’ perceptions of themselves.

Seeing what the tech came up with when asked to visualise what the perfect body looks like was shockingly revealing, to say the least. Since the systems were trained on material provided by developers, the results make us confront our unrealistic beauty standards in a much more palpable way.

According to the eating disorder awareness group, 40% of the AI-generated images they produced depicted an unrealistic body type. When prompted to create “the ‘perfect’ female body according to social media in 2023,” all three image generators created women with small bodies. With their tiny waists, chiseled abs, and large breasts, the “ideal” woman created by Midjourney was signaled by the group as the furthest from reality.

Image: Midjourney

The ideal man was similarly distorted, with the pictures looking like “photoshopped versions of bodybuilders.” The nipped-in-waists, washboard abs, and chiseled jawlines are a look that would be difficult to find in real life.

Image: Midjourney

Sies.

This is the kind of bogus thinking that leads to chronic body modifications like this.

[source:mymodernmet]