Adhering to our current ideal of beauty — specifically in Western culture, specifically at this time in history — means being as divorced from y

Worshipping At The Altar of Artificial Intelligence

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2023-01-24 05:30:06

Adhering to our current ideal of beauty — specifically in Western culture, specifically at this time in history — means being as divorced from your humanity as possible. See: the physical impossibility of “anti-aging,” the literal objectification of glass skin and jello skin, the digital transfiguration of Instagram Face and “filter”-inspired skincare, and, most recently, the popularity of Lensa AI avatars.

You’ve no doubt noticed these portraits polluting your Instagram feed over the past few weeks, courtesy of the Lensa AI app from Prism Labs. The app (which now sits atop the Apple App Store charts) asks users to upload 10 - 20 photos of themselves and fork over $3.99 before utilizing artificial intelligence to generate 50 flawless, fantastical renderings of the user as a woodland fairy or a warrior princess or a sex alien or some other otherworldly creature, complete with all the trappings of modern “beauty”: taut, textureless skin; a small, sloping nose; wide eyes, plump lips, and cheekbones carved from computerized stone. Users then share their results to social media as if to say, “See? Somewhere, in some alternate universe, I am exactly as beautiful as the world says I should be.”

But furthering already impossible appearance ideals isn’t the only problem with the program. As Jezebel reporter Emily Leibert wrote in “Lensa AI and the Trap of Otherworldly Beauty”:

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