With the prevalence of AI in every sphere of our life, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it has also created what the ideal man and woman would look like. This result was derived from social media data and results all over the Internet. The images were designed through engagement analytics on social media, where billions of images were looked at by people. This design was monitored by the Bulimia Project, which is an eating disorder awareness group, which further warned that the results were quite unrealistic in their depiction of how one looked.
The project further mentioned that the images of women tended to be biased towards brown eyes, blonde hair, and olive skin, but for men, it was biased towards brown hair, brown eyes, and olive skin. Needless to say, the images were also much more sexually charged than was necessary. [1]
AI’s Vision Of A Perfect Man And Woman Involves Brown Eyes, Blond Hair, And The Most Chiselled Beach Body Ever
Around 67% of the images of men that the AI created included brown hair, and almost two-thirds of the images further included olive skin. Based on pictures taken from social media, the perfect female body was tanned and had Caucasian-looking women with small waists and slim figures. On the other hand, the perfect men had robust figures, with six packs, and wore tight t-shirts. The Bulimia Project highlighted, “Considering that social media uses algorithms based on which content gets the most lingering eyes, it’s easy to guess why AI’s renderings would come out more sexualized. But we can only assume that the reason AI came up with so many oddly shaped versions of the physiques it found on social media is that these platforms promote unrealistic body types, to begin with.” [2]
The project further added, “In the age of Instagram and Snapchat filters, no one can reasonably achieve the physical standards set by social media. So, why try to meet unrealistic ideals? It’s both mentally and physically healthier to keep body image expectations squarely in the realm of reality.”
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Perfection Is, After All, Unrealistic
For the AI-designed women, around 37 percent of the images had blonde hair, while 53 percent of the images had pictures of women with olive skin. On the other hand, 67 percent of the AI-generated images of men had brown hair, while 63 percent of the images also showed tanned skin, showing a clear preference for men with medium-tone skin and darker hair. After utilizing AI to analyze the images that were presented by social media as the perfect man and woman, the Bulimia Project then asked the Intelligence to share its perspective based on how the images appeared all over the Internet.
For the perfect man in 2023, the AI showed images of men that had facial hair and brown eyes and hair. When the same prompt was used for searching the images of the perfect woman, the result had images of females with brown hair, brown eyes, and tanned skin.
The AI study, for those wondering, which was conducted by the Bulimia Project using Dall-E 2, Stable DIffusion, and Midjourney, also found out that the collection of social-media-inspired images for AI was a little more sexual than it needed to be.
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Sources
- “AI shows what the ‘perfect man and woman’ look like, as eating disorder group slams ‘unrealistic’ results.” LBC. Kit Heren. May 17, 2023.
- “AI creates images of the ‘perfect’ man and woman.” Sky News. May 17, 2023.
- “Scrolling Into Bias: Social Media’s Effect on AI Art.” Bulimia