The age of AI Face

AI generated influencers and our obsession with perfecting the female body

i guess AIs have needs too

I recently stumbled upon the Instagram account of an AI generated influencer, and it’s left me feeling haunted.

I wish I could say it was just from bearing witness to an AI account posting thirst traps responded to almost exclusively by other AI accounts (see above). But it’s not a Dead Internet future that really scares me. It’s a future where we’re so inundated with images of AI generated women that we forget what actual human women look like.

This image in particular is from the account fit_aitana, a virtual persona developed by a marketing agency in Barcelona, which claims “AI models are more reliable and easier to work with than humans.” Because, why hire an actual human woman—who has a personality and demands to be compensated for work—to sell products to other human women, when you could use AI instead?

In addition to visual assets, the marketing agency crafted a backstory for Aitana, describing her as a fan of fitness and video games. Aitana “expresses her opinion without reservation,” and it can be “difficult to get a smile out of her, showing her complexity.” Clearly intended to provide texture to this virtual woman, it reads more like what you would expect an LLM to generate in response to the prompt you are a teenage boy, describe the perfect woman.

The Instagram account is populated with images of Aitana doing things that influencers do: taking airport selfies, looking hot at the gym, and posing on fancy beach vacations. Stare at these images for more than a second and you’ll notice something remarkably alive and yet chillingly dead about all of the generated faces.

AI Face is the new Instagram Face

Five years ago, Jia Tolentino articulated the eerie phenomenon of Instagram Face in an article for the New Yorker. Even if you’ve never heard the phrase before (which has its own Wikipedia page), you would surely recognize it if you saw it. Instagram Face is a distinct beauty aesthetic that’s mimicked and mass produced in images across social media: bambi-like eyes, a teeny tiny nose, high cheekbones, and a vacant, placating gaze. It’s exemplified by Kim Kardashian, the real estate agents on Selling Sunset, and just about every famous beauty and lifestyle influencer on the internet.

Tolentino’s key insight was that, similar to how certain images perform well on social media platforms, certain faces perform well. The standard of Instagram Face was born out of algorithmic engagement, a result of what facial features bring in the most clicks, comments, and likes. Beauty standards had converged on a “generic sameness.” And a whole ecosystem of tooling, both in real life with fillers and botox, and online, with filters and Facetune, emerged to help women achieve this aesthetic ideal.

The creators behind Aitana claim that they tried to make a more “curvy” AI persona that didn’t adhere to the existing Instagram beauty standards, but their clients didn’t want that. Their clients wanted a “perfect model.” And in the economics of engagement algorithms, this desire makes sense. Clients are paying to have Aitana post about their product. They want an image that performs well. They want a woman’s face that exists for one singular purpose: to drive engagement. And nothing is more captivating than the fantasy of a perfect woman.

Instagram Face has maintained its dominance and popularity, but with the proliferation of generative AI image models, its moment is ending. We’re barreling towards the age of AI Face.

Perfecting the female body

Recently, I was chatting with a psychologist friend of mine about the potential impacts of a world filled with AI images of women. She said, “have you ever found yourself scrolling Instagram thinking about how insanely beautiful everyone is? And then you go somewhere in public like the airport. You look around, and realize that in reality everyone actually looks so…normal.”

The deeply relatable feeling she identified is social media’s nefarious ability to warp your perception of the world. Yes, billboards, movies, and magazines have been inundating women for decades and telling us that the way we look is wrong. But with social media you can drop into a vortex of poreless skin, symmetrical eyebrows, and pouty lips. It’s a decadent, overindulgent consumption of beauty. And it’s easy to forget that world is curated, manufactured, and not representative of reality.

We are and always have been obsessed with perfecting the female body. From tiny feet, to long necks, large foreheads, pale skin, and tiny waists, just about every corner of the world has tried to manipulate women’s bodies to achieve some contemporary definition of beauty.

A desire to mold and control women through aesthetics is a preexisting condition. As is often the case, AI did not create the problem. But AI will make it devastatingly worse. We’ll be able to create a limitless supply of perfect women. Women who never sweat, never speak, never age. Generative AI capabilities enable our longstanding obsession with preserving a form of the female body that is truly unsustainable.

Try not to let AI Face rot your brain

At least for now, most of the images we see of women on the internet are not AI generated (even if they are highly edited). But as AI models improve in quality and it takes less and less time to generate high fidelity images, the AI Face beauty aesthetic will take hold.

Instagram Face is achieved through cosmetic manipulation, lighting, and makeup. But AI Face is a form of perfection that by definition does not exist.

So before the flood of AI faces desensitize our brains, let’s all take a minute to appreciate what actual humans look like. Go to the grocery store or a coffee shop, take a look at everyone around you, and marvel in their humanness.