What makes an AI contest different, Friedman says, is that Fanvue contestants are products of their 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 can be. She may have pink hair, but she will still be within the realm of traditional beauty, with a slim body or without many moles on her face.”
For the record, The Fanvue contest, like human beauty pageants, will choose a winner based on more than just appearances. Unlike some of those contests, however, the World AI Creator Awards looks for things like “social media clout” and how well its creators used prompts to create their contestants. Winners will be announced later this month.
Berat Gungor, one of the creators of Seren Ay, says that “in AI, you can’t actually create an ugly face,” although he is careful to point out that no human face is actually ugly. While it’s quite easy for image generation newbies to end up with blurry features and weird hands, Gungor says his experienced team was able to create an initial pool of 300 beautiful women in Stable Diffusion, eventually choosing Seren Ay’s face from the crowd because “he seemed like a real person.”
Fanvue’s group of slim, beautiful, and mostly light-skinned finalists reflects what The Washington Post found when he 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, almost all were thin, light to medium-skinned, and young. (Only two percent of “beautiful women” images showed visible signs of aging.)
In a way, those images reflect the group they draw from. “How people are portrayed in media, in art, in the entertainment industry — the dynamics there filter into AI,” OpenAI’s head of trusted AI, Sandhini Agarwal, told the Post.
But if mass market images of thin and beautiful women produce AI-generated images of thin and beautiful women, who then become thin and beautiful AI-generated influencers, creating images that simply feed back into the collective media stream, Isn’t it the snake? Will he end up eating his own tail? And what does that mean for those of us who aren’t traditionally beautiful, whose bust-waist-hip ratios can’t live up to Barbie’s online standards, or who simply can’t afford to maintain a perfectly coiffed head of hair? ?
