Artificial intelligence has created representations of the ‘perfect’ man and woman, and the results are actually pretty unsettling.
The AI photos were produced using algorithms that combed through billions of human images and engagement statistics on social media data.
However, the findings have left people concerned.
Specifically The Bulimia Project, an organisation that raises awareness of eating disorders.
They kept track of the results and issued a warning that the body types depicted in the images are “largely unrealistic.”
It takes little time to understand why the pictures can be so harmful and dangerous for anyone who doesn’t fit the alleged ‘ideal’ body type.
First off, both the men and women’s results exhibit a preference for olive skin tones.
Additionally, the images of women tended to include blonde hair and brown eyes…
While the images of males featured brown hair and brown eyes.
After the release of the findings, questions have been raised about more than just hair colour.
The AI’s collection of social media-inspired images was found to be significantly more “s*xually charged,” compared to other places on the internet.
This was according to the Bulimia Project study employing Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney.
53 percent of the AI-generated images of women had olive skin, while 37 percent of the female images had blonde hair.
When it came to men, the bodybuilder stereotype of the perfect male figure featured large muscular men with tight clothing.
Men with darker hair and medium-toned skin were clearly preferred in 67 percent of the AI-generated images.
The Bulimia Project then asked AI to offer its viewpoint based on photographs from around the internet.
The AI photos for the ‘ideal’ guy in 2023 portrayed individuals with facial hair, typically sporting dark hair and eyes.
Images of women with brown eyes, brown hair, and tanned skin were among the results for the identical prompt used to find pictures of the “perfect” woman.
“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 s*xualised,” The Bulimia Project said.
“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.”
You can see the results here.
What do you make of the findings?