Althouse: Asking AI to make a beautiful face more and more beautiful ends up in the same place as a person who gets too much plastic surgery.

October 25, 2024

Asking AI to make a beautiful face more and more beautiful ends up in the same place as a person who gets too much plastic surgery.

But you'll have to go to TikTok to see it: here.

28 comments:

rhhardin said...: Same for asking your photo processing app to make the picture sharper.; 10/25/24, 10:06 AM
MadisonMan said...: Apparently lip fullness and lash length goes to infinity in AI land.; 10/25/24, 10:08 AM
JRoberts said...: Okay, that's gonna cause some nightmares...; 10/25/24, 10:10 AM
rehajm said...: I got the scary AI ‘Einstein at a college party’ in my morning feed. Kinda cool, actually…; 10/25/24, 10:11 AM
Ann Althouse said...: TikTok wouldn't offer embedding code, so I thought that if I shared it to X, I could use X's embedding code to embed here, but that just displayed one still image and, if you clicked it, you'd go to TikTok. Lesson learned.; 10/25/24, 10:11 AM
RCOCEAN II said...: LOL - you end up with a Halloween mask.

I suppose the AI is programmed to think rosy cheeks or large eyes, etc. are "beautiful" so when you say " more beautiful" it just gives you more of those features till you end up looking like a manquienn (sic); 10/25/24, 10:11 AM
RCOCEAN II said...: ask the AI to make Barbara Steisand "More beautiful". Lets see the result! And then do Trump's wife.; 10/25/24, 10:12 AM
Shouting Thomas said...: I’ve found, in general, that asking DALL-E to edit and sharpen an image it created results in a distorted image.; 10/25/24, 10:14 AM
rehajm said...: They try to hoist those AI ‘…in 50s Panavision’ movie trailers, too. Yuk ☢️; 10/25/24, 10:15 AM
Saint Croix said...: ha ha

AI thinks robots look better than people; 10/25/24, 10:16 AM
Saint Croix said...: Reminds me of that line from The Graduate

~"I want to say one word to you."; 10/25/24, 10:19 AM
Wince said...: Toward the very end the face became more metallic and robot-like.

Coincidence? Or did AI just become more sentient and self-aware?

"It becomes self-aware at 2: 14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29."; 10/25/24, 10:20 AM
n.n said...: Smoothing until there is nothing at all. Exaggeration because more is better. Models of humans wrung through a Photoshop looking glass.; 10/25/24, 10:21 AM
Aggie said...: Ghastly.; 10/25/24, 10:23 AM
Peachy said...: The over-puffed-up lip thing... ugh. Wealthy women with nothing better to do than look at themselves in the mirror all day.; 10/25/24, 10:41 AM
Smilin' Jack said...: Now do the body.; 10/25/24, 10:43 AM
gspencer said...: Lisa Rinna,

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2024-04/12/9/asset/70d74c28c1ca/sub-buzz-2618-1712914396-1.jpg?crop=2984%3A2656%3B581%2C0&downsize=700%3A%2A&output-quality=auto&output-format=auto; 10/25/24, 10:44 AM
PM said...: Think it would've been a more interesting demo had it started with a real face rather than an illustration.; 10/25/24, 10:56 AM
planetgeo said...: Speaking of AI, among other AI tools, lately I've been working with Anthropic's Sonnet 3.5 and find its ability to analyze and interpret images (charts, graphs, photos) simply amazing. It's going to be a marvelous accessibility aid for the visually impaired.; 10/25/24, 11:00 AM
mtp said...: You can't really improve on beautiful women above a certain level. You can only get different types of the same level of beautiful.

Years ago I bet a workmate our lunch tab that I could prove our waitress was the most beautiful girl in the world. I asked: if we went on a double date with her and the most beautiful girl in the world, but I got to choose a girl first, would you feel like you had lost anything? You wouldn't. Ergo, she is as beautiful as the most beautiful girl in the world. QED. He was a good sport.; 10/25/24, 11:03 AM
Temujin said...: Did I see Madonna in one of those slides?; 10/25/24, 11:24 AM
tcrosse said...: Standards of beauty change from time to time and culture to culture. Is this programmed into the AI?; 10/25/24, 11:37 AM
Achilles said...: The issue with this is that female beauty is about being Common or Average from a biological point of view. There is an average eye position, lip size, face width, eye size, nose size, cheek position. The closer to the average number each of these metrics is the more attractive the female will be.

This is born out by studies that create composite faces from a sample of women that averages their features out. The larger the sample of faces the more attractive the composite face became.

The problem the AI faces is when it starts to try deviating from the average.

The most average woman will be the most attractive.; 10/25/24, 11:45 AM
Readering said...: Sound but no sight. Just black; 10/25/24, 1:24 PM
effinayright said...: Just you wait: some gaslighting prog will tell us the ideal human face should look like these, from "The Twilight Zone":

https://tinyurl.com/2tawvye3; 10/25/24, 2:41 PM
Leland said...: I saw a face, but how can you judge beauty from that alone?; 10/25/24, 3:40 PM
minnesota farm guy said...: First question: Why is she white?; 10/25/24, 4:27 PM
The Godfather said...: The Godfather
Look at what's been posted above, or on other threads (or whatever they're called now). Regular People are trying to recapture the conversation. Kamala is not what we're looking for, but neither is Trump. I guess I should add "dot com" after the name of every political figure.
We (Americans) are looking for leaders (truth be told, we're looking for heroes). No one like that is available. So what do we do?
My best guess (intuition) is that a four-year Trump term would take us less far away from our search for decent leadership than a (prospectively) eight year Harris term.
But your mileage may vary.; 10/25/24, 5:46 PM