What Does an Ugly Face Look Like to AI?

What happens when you ask AI to generate a beautiful person versus an ugly person? Studies have found that generative AI repeatedly produces young, light-skinned faces when prompted for beauty. In another experiment asking AI to create an ugly person, features like aging and facial asymmetry were frequently associated with ugliness. Getty Images' project 'Erasing Ugly from the Internet' visualizes this phenomenon. AI did not invent these beauty standards. It learned them from human-made photos, advertising, films, and the internet, absorbing our biases along the way.

But what happens when AI reproduces the same standards across countless images, and we begin learning what beauty looks like from them? Humans taught AI what beauty is. Now AI is teaching it back to us. Algorithms reinforce bias, and we accept it as a natural standard. If this feedback loop continues, beauty standards may become increasingly homogenized. Are you accepting the beauty AI has drawn for you?