“Look like the best version of you with FaceTune. Reshape your face, face your best self. ‘Elevate’ your photos with one-tap beauty filters.” These are the types of slogans you get when you open facial and body editing apps. Airbrush and Facetune are some of the most highly regarded photoshop software, a click and a touch and you can get rid of blemishes, make your waist tinier, or push up your boobs.
These apps allow you to edit yourself into the most perfect version of “you.” You get to curate yourself and control how others see you — even if it’s not what you look like. Facial editing software adds a whole new dimension to Instagram curation. You can now not only change your followers’ perception of your aesthetics but also what you look like. This control used to be in the hands of the editor, but what happens when you hand over control to Artificial Intelligence?
Like most apps trying to stay with the times, Airbrush and Facetune have implemented AI into their editing software.
You’re just one download away from looking like “the typical standard of online beauty” or competing with it.
A standard for beauty has been reinforced for generations, in the models you see on the cover of Vogue, in the TV shows you flip through, in the content creators promoted on social media.
Standard’s in beauty come with their own problems, they can lead to eating disorders, anxiety, depression, social isolation, and a general feeling of low self-worth. But incorporating AI into the standard, introduces a frightening version of beauty, a digital version of “you,” untethered from reality.
AI creates a version of beauty that only exists online, without pores, frizzy hair, or imperfections in general – and it’s enticing to join that world. Recent studies have shown that 71% of people won’t post a picture online without photoshopping it first.
Beauty becomes harder and harder to achieve because it’s not representative of real life, but rather an online reality filled with clicks and likes.
Swapping your face for someone else’s until you don’t look like yourself, but instead like everyone else who used AI, creates an online world untethered from the truth.
There is a direct link between editing photos and cosmetic enhancement procedures.
The line between reality and online curation becomes blurry when your source of confidence comes from a false reality. A reality that 71% of Instagram users perpetuate.
Creating a standard in beauty is disputable enough, but creating a fake standard, stating that you can achieve perfection with the help of AI creates a world where beauty is not widespread, unique and joyful, but interchangeable in a single swipe.
When our self becomes an online avatar, reconstructed by technological advances, there’s no connection from Instagram anymore. The people you meet online, the people might even fall in love with online aren’t meeting the real you, they’re meeting the AI version.
Handing control of your curation to AI, which is funded by private corporations as well as the government, takes away your power as an individual. It takes away your ability to present yourself as you are and implements a precedent of insecurity, unless your face is edited.
There’s no right way to present yourself. Everyone can choose what they want to do with their phones and with their lives. However presenting yourself online, without the assistance of generative AI, helps fight against American beauty standardization.
The intersection of technology and beauty will continue to blur. It’s up to you to resist. It’s up to you to not become an generated standard and instead be whomever you choose to be.
Beauty comes from uniqueness. AI technology in facial editing software is impeding our individuality — and we must choose to fight back.
Generative AI has the potential to alter the relationship between technology and the human experience of the self, more specifically, celebrating the self.
Embracing individualism is radical in the current wave of insecurity. Protest sameness by standing out. Protest technology bleeding into humanity by showing your unique oneness, your unique character in every facet of your life – even online.
Words by Alexa LoSchiavo