Artificial Intelligence Thinks You Are Ugly: An Interview with Artist Gretchen Andrew

There’s a direct line between lip fillers and technological apocalypse, and Gretchen Andrew draws it in her latest project. Global Beauty series. The collection, recently acquired by the Whitney Museum in New York, reveals the preferences of the hidden algorithms that define our current beauty standards. A standard that none of the Miss Ball contestants can reach. During our conversation, Andrew and I discussed how impossible standards flatten people’s relationships with their bodies and homogenize faces across the globe. What’s at stake? “The whole diversity of humanity is lost,” the artist said.

Gretchen is a former Googler and Silicon Valley dropout. After becoming disillusioned with the way technology was designed to exploit users and experiencing a culture that punished her for dressing like Cher inabilityGretchen left the tech world to pursue a career in the arts. In the art world, she freely uses technology subversively and wears short skirts as a form of 3.0 feminism. Her previous projects: Thirst trap glitch GIFin which she used SEO optimization techniques to get her vision board canvas to the top of search results for “Contemporary Art Auction Records,” perfectly capturing the artist’s drive.

Gretchen could have gone further down this path, using her talents to expose technological vulnerabilities while promoting her name. However, Global Beauty Marks departure. Or maybe it’s an evolution or maturation. It wasn’t in Gretchen’s interests, but it was in line with her strategy. The focus is less explicitly on her and more on the technology that traps us all. Making us never feel good enough. Always ugly. All while leaving us craving more of this feeling. Gretchen will be the first to admit that she can’t shake her social media addiction. But recognition, whether through her work or her words, is always the first step.

First of all, congratulations on being acquired by Whitney. what can you tell us about Facetune Portrait Projects and jobs obtained?

exist Facetune PortraitI examine how AI-driven beauty standards impact the way we experience ourselves and others. I’m taking the power that’s often invisible—whether it’s digital facial adjustments or the way it affects lip fillers and plastic surgery—and making it visible so we can talk about it. In my series Global Beauty, I look at Miss Universe contestants from around the world—who are stunningly beautiful—but who aren’t good enough for the algorithms, leaving the rest of us completely hopeless. Not only that, contestants come from all over the world. They should look completely different, but when we see Miss Jamaica having the same body as Miss Finland having the same body as Miss Philippines, we see the homogenizing effects of AI. It compresses all of humanity into a uniform appearance.

Describe the aesthetics of Facetune. What do algorithms think is beautiful?

We have become accustomed to seeing each other and ourselves on two-dimensional screens. Since screens are flat, our expectations of how we should look are trying to mimic three dimensions within the two-dimensional space of the screen. An example would be ridiculously large lips. Some people really like the way those big lips look from the front, but no one thinks they look great from the side. That’s why we have memes surrounding “duck lips.” There’s a clear priority to making sure we look good on screen. It reminds me of ancient Egyptian art. The reason the hieroglyphs have distorted bodies is because the Egyptians wanted to convey the three-dimensionality of the body within a two-dimensional surface. So they represent each part of the body from the most easily identifiable angle and then glue them together. This is really what’s happening with our cameras and algorithms today: we’re trying to convey three dimensions in the 2D space of the screen.

What do we lose when we do this?

All human diversity is lost. There have always been beauty standards, but never before has there been a single, universal, international standard of beauty. We are also losing touch with our actual bodies. We prioritize how people view what they do. We prioritize how we look rather than how we feel. In this prioritization, we lose a very important connection with ourselves. Another thing we are losing is the celebration of the individual. Not only did I see a desire for beauty, I saw the same desire as everyone else. For people today, that’s safer than looking like their true selves.

How is this different from the 90s before social media, when media was dominated by a few channels or Vogue, and these Western exports set dominant beauty standards globally?

I think AI is developing significantly faster and more consistently. While there have been Western beauty standards like this before, maybe Japan or Kenya have slightly different beauty standards. With the help of artificial intelligence, this convergence of beauty standards has accelerated. Increasingly, anyone—and they don’t need extensive Photoshop skills—can take an image of themselves, run it through the Facetune algorithm, and then go to a plastic surgeon and say: Make me look like this.

I read a study from Cornell University that showed that 0.2% of the data used to train artificial intelligence comes from Africa and South America. Do you know where most of the data that trains these beauty algorithms comes from?

We are in a feedback loop, especially when it comes to social media. I’m sure you’ve noticed that if you post a photo of your face or someone else’s face, you’re more likely to get engagement. I don’t think it’s because that’s what people want to see. I think the platforms are pushing for more engagement to get more images of faces and bodies to train their algorithms on. I think Instagram must be Western in terms of numbers. It’s not so much who is using it, but the number of images people see. For example, influencers have more followers and gain more exposure. No matter how many regular people use the app, most people will see images that look like these influencers.

What made you interested in discussing social media and beauty standards in your work?

I love finding things that seem innocuous, frivolous, and feminine and using them as opportunities to discuss technology and its impact on our lives. Beauty standards seem to be an area that’s mature and a lot of people aren’t thinking about artificial intelligence or the technological apocalypse, so it becomes a very wide door to have these conversations. On top of that, I think a lot about women contorting their bodies and metaphorical shapes to meet social expectations, especially as we get older. I’m approaching 40 and my friends are getting Botox or having plastic surgery. This project is not about shaming women for these things. It’s about understanding where the standards come from and making decisions based on that.

Can you talk about your decision to turn these digital images into paintings via a canvas printer?

I wanted to create a portrait that showed who we are and who we are told to be at the same time. I wanted to represent this in a way that became part of the history of portraiture. Portraits always show what we value at any given time. Look at me and my extended family. Look at my jewelry. Look at the land behind me. I want to look at what’s important to us in the current world of artificial intelligence, and I think what’s important to us is adaptation. It is accepted by the algorithm.

What do you think of celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker who refuse to have plastic surgery?

Such celebrities do matter. They remind us that beauty can exist outside of algorithms. Moreover, she won’t come today. She’s already a big deal and she can now do that in a way that I think is really important and interesting. What I would really like to see is a very young person make the same decision and be successful. I think it’s going to be more difficult.

completely. i read memoirs careless person Author: Sarah Wayne Williams. This is a true portrait of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. After reading it, I was so excited and I thought, “I have to get off social media.” And then, of course, I didn’t. So my question is, what does consciousness do? Having an idea can change things. But my question is: is it?

In terms of the role of awareness, I think it makes us realize that we’re making choices even as we continue to use filters and use lip fillers. Technology has made everything so seamless that we’re stuck in a ridiculous world where people inject something they bought on Alibaba into their lips, and it just happens to be cement. This quickly became normal. I firmly believe that social media will become the tobacco of our generation and have an impact on mental health. We know it’s not good for us but still smoke. When I hang up the phone, I might scroll through Instagram. Awareness doesn’t win the war, but it’s at least a way to understand what’s going on, and perhaps have more agency as individuals, even if as a society we’re completely screwed.

My final question is, if social media is as bad for us as tobacco, then why do you still use it?

Because I’m addicted.

Yes, me too.

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