Friedman argues that what makes AI contests different is that Fanvue’s contestants are the product of their creators. “They’re playing on all of the stereotypes we have about what a ‘beautiful woman’ is,” she says. “People who are inclined to use AI might have a different idea of what an attractive woman is. A contestant might have pink hair, but they’d still be within traditional categories of beauty, have a thin body, and not many moles on their face.”
For the record, Fanvue’s contests, like human beauty pageants, will determine winners based on more than just appearance. But unlike other contests, the World AI Creator Awards will evaluate things like “social media influence” and how well creators used prompts in creating their contestants. Winners are expected to be announced later this month.
“With AI, you can’t really make an ugly face,” says Berat Gungor, one of Seren Ay’s creators, though he is careful to point out that there is no such thing as a truly ugly human face. While it’s easy for a beginner at image generation to create a blurry face or weird hands, Gungor says that the experienced team used Stable Diffusion to create an initial pool of 300 beautiful women, from which they ultimately chose Seren Ay’s face “because she looked like a real human.”
Fanvue’s pool of thin, beautiful, mostly fair-skinned finalists mirrors what The Washington Post found when it commissioned Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion to create beautiful women. Stating that these programs tend to “lead users to a surprisingly narrow view of attractiveness,” The Post reported last week that of the thousands of images generated, almost all were thin, fair-to-medium skinned, and youthful. (Only 2 percent of the images of “beautiful women” showed visible signs of aging.)
In a way, these images reflect the pool they’re drawn from: “The dynamics of how people are represented in the media, arts and entertainment industries are bleeding into AI,” Sandini Agarwal, head of trustworthy AI at OpenAI, told The Post.
But if popular images of thin, beautiful women beget AI-generated images of thin, beautiful women, which in turn beget AI-generated images of even thinner, beautiful women who become AI-generated influencers of even thinner, beautiful women, creating images that are fed back into our collective media streams, isn’t it possible that the snake will end up eating its own tail? And what does that mean for people who don’t have traditional beauty, whose bust-waist-hip ratios don’t meet Barbie-like online standards, or who can’t afford to maintain perfectly coiffed hair?