OTAN News
AI Confirms Our Unrealistic Body Ideals: What AI regards as the ideal body type and why it’s so problematic.
Gather a group of people together and many will have body shaming stories, dieting extremes, and the ever-ending parade of an unattainable body expectation. Whether it’s a large backside or nonexistent front side, whatever the perceived body problem, these have all been amplified, throughout time, by advertisers and the media long before the arrival Artificial Intelligence (AI).
What’s clear from Dr. Heather Widdows article in Psychology Today, is AI draws “the ideal body type from the engine’s interpretation of social media.” Of course, social media draws from our society. “What this tells us, then is not what AI think is the ideal body, but what we – or at least those of us who use social media – think is the ideal body.” From the book Perfect Me (2018), there is now a global ideal, “Thin, Firm, Smooth, and Young.”
These four ideas are “becoming increasingly harder to achieve, in part driven by technological advances in filters, photo editing, and cosmetic procedures.” No one can reasonably achieve these social standards set by social media. In an AI-created world, “40% of the AI-generated images overall depicted ‘unrealistic’ body types – 37% of the images of women and 43% of men.”
AI amplifies this negative mirror of ourselves. How do we recognize our society’s own aspiration toward an “impossibly perfect” body ideal? With an increasing awareness of this ideal, educators can create critical thinking around the images AI generates and we use in our classrooms.
References
[1] https://nypost.com/2023/05/16/ai-defines-ideal-body-type-per-social-media
[2] Widdows, Heather Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal, Princeton University Press, 2018, p.23
[3] https://bulimia.com/examine/scrolling-into-bias/
[4] https://bulimia.com/examine/scrolling-into-bias/
[5] Widdows, Heather Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal, Princeton University Press, 2018, p.86