In this era of rapid technological development, more and more science and technology have entered our lives, which has also caused many problems. As the integration of social media and artificial intelligence continues to deepen, beautifying through artificial intelligence technology when sharing photos seems to have become a must for all beauty lovers. Special effects such as slimmer face, big eyes and red lips have become a popular feature from Snapchat to TikTok. The photo editing work that used to be time-consuming, labor-intensive and not necessarily satisfactory can now be quickly generated with the help of artificial intelligence to create a good-looking portrait that meets the public's aesthetics with just a tap at peoples’ fingertips. However, at the same time, people find that their photos are becoming more and more similar in style, composition and even appearance. More importantly, people's aesthetic concepts have also subtly changed, from pluralism to unity. Certain appearances are becoming more and more popular, while niche aesthetics or looks lost their own market and voice and eliminated in more and more similar beautifications. Therefore, while making people's lives more convenient, artificial intelligence has intensified the homogenization of aesthetics, which has resulted in the reduction of the influence of minority groups and formed deeper social contradictions.
People’s Understanding of Beauty
In the history of human civilization, people's definition of beauty has been constantly changing and formed different aesthetics. In the western world, aesthetics are often associated with religion or social trends. In the ancient Greek period, the definition of beauty was often abstract and associated with various spirits. For example, Plato linked beauty to happiness, love, and wisdom. (Plato) Of course, there are also some concrete descriptions. For example, Aristotle emphasized the structure of beauty and believed that a beautiful face shape is moderate, not too big or too small. (Aristotle) Next, beauty was closely integrated with Christianity, and faces that resembled the face of God were considered beautiful. After the Renaissance, the discussion of beauty gradually became more concrete and diverse, and the study of facial structure also began in many aspects. By the 20th century, people defined beauty in terms of emotional expression, facial muscles, good-looking facial features, sexual desires, etc. At the same time, with the development of liberalism, attention to beauty extends to minority groups, and people begin to pay attention to niche appearances outside of popular aesthetics. (Synnott) In general, the Western definition of beauty continues to be more specific and diverse along with the transformation of social trends, gradually entering the modern understanding of beauty.
In other places, such as China, people's aesthetics have experienced great changes. In ancient China, it was believed that fullness and solidity were symbols of beauty. Chinese philosophers believed that beauty was elegant and the embodiment of nature. (Zhuang) During the Tang Dynasty, women who were favored by the emperor were often slightly overweight. (Bossler) In a novel depicting the Song Dynasty, brave and handsome male characters often have dark skin, firm eyes, and long beards. (Shi) In modern times, with frequent exchanges between China and the world, people's aesthetics are gradually moving towards European aesthetics. (Hua) This is the result of the influence of the Internet on China's original aesthetics.
At the same time, subjective factors can also affect aesthetics. If people have a favorable impression of a person in terms of intelligence, friendliness, and strengths, they are more inclined to believe that that person is beautiful. (Munro) In summary, the aesthetic of the human body is constantly deepening and changing in the development of society, which not only includes physical beauty, but also combines with human spirit or subjective consciousness. In the past century, with the development of globalization and the Internet, people's aesthetics gradually moved closer to the same trend.
How AI Beautification Operates
Thebeautification of photos by artificial intelligence is essentially a repetitive algorithm. That means to use AI instead of manual operations to modify the appearance of people in photos, making it more in line with public aesthetics. First, the technology companies collect all kinds of data from various resources and store the data. These data include various images on social media and their popularity level. Next, they summarized and organized these images, integrating images of different types and features. Then, they classify the data and build a model using algorithms according to the classification. After thousands of times of training, the models get more precise. Finally, the models can automatically classify the rest of the data and show the most suitable classification, which is referred to as artificial intelligence. (Neapolitan and Jiang) Therefore, each input photo can match a similar classification, and artificial intelligence can thus make appropriate modifications to the image based on the classification. It is evident that the enhancement of images by artificial intelligence is not fundamentally achieved through people's understanding of beauty, but through imitating beautiful works based on a large amount of data and experience, though such results are often beautiful.
Additionally, since most people have similar aesthetic preferences, and the photos they publish represent their own aesthetic preferences, these companies will collect more of this type of aesthetic when collecting photo data. Therefore, when conducting classification and algorithm training, they will encounter more aesthetically similar data, forming a larger database. (Neapolitan and Jiang) When forming photos, the probability of artificial intelligence algorithms encountering such aesthetics is also higher, so the beautified portrait is more likely to belong to this "mainstream" aesthetic style.
The Social Impact of AI Beautification
These AI-generated photos, on one hand, indeed enhance the beauty of individuals in the photos. After learning from hundreds of millions of photos, artificial intelligence can accurately analyze each person's features and identify similar cases to enhance facial portraits, significantly improving the aesthetics of these photos and making individuals more willing to share their photos on social media, thus reducing appearance anxiety. Furthermore, more and more individuals are adopting this function because of the quickness and ease of it to use. This plays an important role in promoting self-expression and showcasing one's own beauty. These are the positive sides of AI beautification.
However, artificial intelligence cannot truly understand beauty. Artificial intelligence remains a program and algorithm, incapable of generating emotions in its calculations. As a result, it cannot infuse people's subjective perceptions, whether from philosophical or religious understanding, into its aesthetic enhancement. The portraits produced by artificial intelligence are merely objective, aesthetically pleasing depictions, and they fail to capture the emotional response to the portrait, and thus cannot convey man-like aesthetic appreciation. Philosophically speaking, this is the perfection of a algorithm on an objective portrait, but it cannot subjectively integrate thoughts and consciousness into beautification. Therefore, the actual core of beauty—inner delight and aesthetic pleasure—may be overlooked by AI-powered beauty augmentation, which lowers people's understanding of beauty from a spiritual to a material level.
Furthermore,artificial intelligence beauty will exacerbate inequality and neglect minority groups. Why do different groups have different aesthetic preferences? This is because many social groups perceive beauty in different ways depending on their aesthetic preferences, lifestyles, and conventional values. Due to differing ideals, different groups of individuals may evaluate an objective portrait differently in terms of its artistic worth. However, artificial intelligence does not have this level of understanding, and its beautification is based on "mainstream" aesthetic judgments. This therefore overlooks the understanding of beauty by other groups. For instance, many beautification algorithms favor whitening and brightening skin tones, yet this overlooks the concerns of people of color. Additionally, they try to make people appear younger, but this disregards the requirements of the aged. Certain algorithms are exclusive to women and, when used by men, can provide peculiar results. When identifying people of different races and disabilities, it may even be difficult to identify or report errors due to insufficient data. The aesthetic needs of other groups are therefore overlooked.
At the same time, more and more "mainstream" aesthetics flood into social media platforms, influencing people's thinking subtly. People gradually accept that portraits that have been beautified by artificial intelligence are true beauty, thus ignoring the understanding of beauty that has been generated spiritually. Some people who already hold this aesthetic viewpoint have further strengthened their views and even created stereotypes, linking AI beautified photos to certain types of people. This can also be called the information cocoon. (Oliveros et al.) For example, with the development of the Internet, the aesthetic of East Asian people is gradually approaching the western aesthetic, thus ignoring their own traditions. This is still based on the discovery of the large population in East Asia, while other sparsely populated tribes or ethnic groups such as the Native Americans and people from Africa or the Arab region face more serious issues of aesthetic loss. A trend like this makes it difficult for some people to express their aesthetics, and the values such aesthetics stand for may eventually vanish. This then exacerbates the influence gap between the majority and other niche groups, making it more difficult for the world to see minority groups, resulting in neglections and exacerbating inequality. Therefore, artificial intelligence beauty may expand the inequality between populations.
Of course, some may argue that as long as we better focus on minority data in artificial intelligence beauty, we can change the current situation. However, such measures cannot change the fact that artificial intelligence has so far been unable to truly understand human emotions. Moreover, minority groups in the world can be infinitely subdivided, and it is unrealistic to have the data required by artificial intelligence cover every group. Therefore, the trend of artificial intelligence beauty exacerbating inequality is inevitable in the short term.
Conclusion
Overall, artificial intelligence beauty has played a positive role in promoting people's appearance. However, due to the limitations of artificial intelligence technology itself, it cannot imitate human understanding of beauty from a spiritual level and can only imitate people's preferences of beauties. This masks the voices of minority group and exacerbates social inequality. Of course, we may be able to adapt artificial intelligence to the aesthetic preferences of minority groups by increasing the number of data samples and improving the algorithm structure. Unfortunately, due to the practical limitations of artificial intelligence algorithms, they are unable to express the inherent meaning of beauty, which hinders people's understanding and cognition of beauty. This turns people's understanding of aesthetics into more concrete judgments that depend less on the users' own values or concepts.
Another solution is to limit the applicabilityof artificial intelligence. We can only allow artificial intelligence to modify certain details of the portrait based on our instructions and cannot make significant modifications to the entire artwork with just one click. This ensures convenience while keeping the image consistent with one's own ideas. This may be a better compromise measure. In consequence, we should dialectically view the existence of artificial intelligence beautification in our lives. We can actively rely on them to improve our portraits, while also being vigilant about their impact on exacerbating inequality in our lives.
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