Kelly Bertrand gets a rather disturbing lesson on AI and how it will impact our beauty standards in the years to come. If you have daughters, you need to read this.
It’s not often I’m left speechless as most of my pals will tell you. But as I type this from my Sydney hotel room, hours after observing a panel discussion on AI and beauty that I’m still trying to process, I’m struggling to figure out the best way to write this story.
Do I lead with the revelation that two out of five women – 40% – would be willing to give up an entire year of their lives to achieve a ‘perfect’ look or body, and specifically, one in five Kiwi women would be willing to give up FIVE YEARS of their lives for the same?
Or is it that according to a prediction by AI expert Nina Shick, 90% of the content we see online will be AI-generated by 2025?
These findings have been released as part of Dove’s The Real State of Beauty global report – and while there are some positives like the fact that in the 20 years since Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty (you remember the ads!) we’ve gone from the sad statistic that only 2% of women found themselves beautiful to somewhere in the 35% realm. And, women, on the whole, feel better represented by the beauty industry.
But AI looms as the biggest threat to our confidence, perception and ability to differentiate from what is real and what is not – a minefield when it comes to toxic images of unrealistic beauty ideals.
The Insidiousness of AI: Biases, Bigotry & Theft
Have you ever thought about where AI comes from? It’s easy to gently imagine AI almost, well, magic – at the press of a button, your needs are met instantly, you’re satisfied and there’s no harm, no foul. Sorry pals, a Satisfyer Pro 2 AI is not. Think of AI generation services as more like the Wizard of Oz – no magic to be seen and just a whole host of disappointment when you peel back the curtains. AI works because companies such as Meta have given them permission to scrape data – your data, my data – from their platforms and servers (terms and conditions, baby).
Of course it’s not just Meta, generative AI services scrape data from everywhere – and that’s how they’re able to generate content, whether that’s an image or a story or whatever. They’re simply gathering existing data and mushing it together to make something ‘new’ – but, as most of us have seen, it’s more often than not, not quite right – like the main image of this story, which was generated in about five seconds by an AI tool – my search? ‘Perfect woman’.
THEN you factor in bias – something I admit I hadn’t given much thought. But when you do think it’s wild – there is SO much more male-written, male-centric and male-first content, studies, stories in the web for AI to scrape. Men were writing books hundreds of years before women were allowed to, health studies, to this day, overwhelmingly focus on male bodies (also this is why the air conditioning is always WAY too cold in offices – it’s often default set to the optimal temp for men). Because AI doesn’t think for itself (which, in some ways is a… good thing, I guess!?) it inherits all the biases of the past – all the ones women especially have been fighting to change.
Many AI tools operate through a male gaze – if you give an AI app a few photos of yourself and ask it to dress you in, say, an evening gown, you’ll more than likely be given an image of yourself as a size 8 (doesn’t matter what size you actually are), clad in a skimpy dress. You’ll have no pores. Your boobs will be, well, boobin’, and you’ll look like you dropped thousands on a LA surgeon.
Even when you give AI apps prompts such as ‘give me wrinkles’ or ‘make me a size 12’ or ‘make me look more womanly’, you’re still getting something out of an anime porn comic.
Chelsea Bonner, the CEO and founder of BELLA Management, a modelling agency, had some bloody interesting takes on this. “Think about it – these companies are run by men,” she said in the Dove panel discussion. “These photos, these ‘women’ don’t exist – these men are stealing women’s jobs. Men want to own and monetise women.”
In New Zealand there is currently no specific AI statutes, laws or regulation for the private sector, however business’ use of AI is “subject to the protections afforded under general law of New Zealand including the Privacy Act, the Human Rights Act, the Fair Trading Act, the Harmful Digital Communications Act, the Crimes Act and the Financial Markets Conduct Act,” says Shift Advisory. Many, however, argue this is far too little for the incoming onslaught of AI-generated content.
Sydney-based Chelsea has launched a petition to urge the Australian Government to impose regulations on AI images and content and elaborates further when she says uncontrolled AI will cost society an untold amount.
“AI is owned and trained predominantly by men. Men who are deciding what women should look like which we have fought for decades to break free from. The AI tech has already been automated to be fetishised for men. We have seen this nightmare made real in the past month with the disturbing use of AI technology to create pornographic images of Taylor Swift being released on X and passed around [more than] 47 million times in 48 hours.”
Generative AI, Chelsea and countless others reckon, is theft, pure and simple. Bodies of real women are used and mixed with AI faces, which are then sold to less-than-ideal sites such as porn, illicit dating – OR as fake influencers selling products.
Jeannie Paterson, a professor of law and director of the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics at the University of Melbourne, told ABC news that generative AI has been the real turning point in AI, which can create realistic-ish images that are easy to manipulate.
“Generative AI … is trained on lots and lots of images that are usually gathered from the internet … but then is able to create its own images,” Jeannie said.
“The reason that creates difficulties for law … is that it’s not a straight copying of the images that it’s found, which means it’s not clear who owns the original data, whether the new images infringe copyright.”
Rather, it’ll copy certain elements of one image and mush them with another. The law has not caught up to the technology. And, Chelsea adds, you’d be surprised at just how many of your favourite brands – Aussie and Kiwi brands – are using the tools and not declaring so.
AI and Beauty – Where Does This Leave Us?
Look, this isn’t a ‘AI is the devil’ story – some of it is bloody useful, like the transcription app I use so I don’t have to transcribe interviews by hand anymore, or the graphic design app we use to make social media templates for Capsule. But when generative AI is used to completely replicate a human – but a far more ‘perfect’ one, then we’re heading into danger territory.
It’s the same thing we faced with the rise of Photoshop, a tool that was initially only used by art directors and graphic designers (who did more than their fair share of damage) but was then put into the hands of, well, everyone. Same problem, different technology.
Transparency and inclusivity are key because AI generated images are already having huge impacts on women and girls – even when, says the Dove report, when we KNOW it’s fake.
Eighty four per cent of Kiwi women and 73% of Kiwi girls know that images of women are digitally altered.
But more than 90% of Kiwi women and more than 85% of Kiwi girls say they have been exposed to harmful beauty content on social media (god, that’s even after the absolute insanity of the 90s magazine market…) and more than 40% of Kiwi women and girls say they feel pressure to alter their appearance because of what they see online, which is far higher than the global average (yay, us).
We’re already up shit creek when we’re attempting to keep things real on social media. After Covid, eating disorders are already on the rise. Social media dictates what is ‘trending’ – and then decides on something different with lightning speed. While diverse voices and empowered figures have risen, and some companies such as Dove have promised not to use AI images in their advertising, there’s no getting around the fact that 15 billion AI images were generated last year alone – the VAST majority of those being of women.
AI is here to stay – but we’ve now reached the point that we need to put the humanity back into innovation.