What makes an AI contest different, says Friedman, is that Fanvue’s contestants are products of its creators. “They’re based on all these stereotypes we have about what a ‘beautiful woman’ is,” she says, “and people who tend to use AI may have a different idea of what an attractive woman might be. She may have pink hair, but she will still be within the realm of traditional beauty, with a thin body or not many moles on her face.”
For the record, The Fanvue contest, like human beauty pageants, will name a winner based on more than just appearances. Unlike some of these contests, though, the World AI Creator Awards is looking for things like “social media influence” and how well its creators used prompts to create their contestants. Winners will be announced later this month.
Berat Gungor, one of Seren Ay’s creators, says that “in AI, you really can’t create an ugly face,” although he is careful to note that no human face is truly ugly. While it’s easy for imaging beginners to end up with blurry features and awkward hands, Gungor says his experienced team was able to create an initial group of 300 beautiful women in Stable Diffusion, ultimately picking Seren Ay’s face out of the crowd because “she it felt like a real person.”
Fanvue’s group of slim, pretty, and mostly light-skinned finalists reflects what the Washington Post found when it tasked Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion with creating beautiful women. Stating that the programs tended to “steer users toward a surprisingly narrow view of attractiveness,” the Post reported last week that in the thousands of images it generated, nearly all were thin, light to medium-skinned and young. (Only 2% of “beautiful woman” images showed visible signs of aging.)
In a way, these images reflect the pool from which they are drawn. “The way people are represented in media, in art, in the entertainment industry — the dynamics there play into AI,” Sandhini Agarwal, head of trustworthy AI at OpenAI, told the Post.
But if mass-market images of beautiful, thin women produce AI-generated images of beautiful, thin women, which then transform into beautiful, thin, AI-generated influencers, creating images that only feed back into the collective media flow, it is not Will the snake end up eating its own tail? And what does this mean for those of us who aren’t traditionally beautiful, whose bust-to-waist-to-hip ratios don’t match online Barbie standards, or who simply can’t afford the upkeep of a head of perfectly coiffed hair? ?
