I should probably be writing about something more important. But the title of a Washington Post article, posted above, illustrates how ChatGPT is accelerating Western progress towards Peak Stupid and mainstream outlets are happily reinforcing the trend. A new focus of ChatGPT queries is advice to women on bettering their looks, allegedly for the purpose of attracting or retaining male partners.
The Internet intensified the appearance arms race, particularly among women.1 The Fox blonde hottie newscaster look has spread to mainstream shows. Internet dating has put a premium on photo-friendly faces. Before, fashion magazine covers regularly had airbrushed, as in fake, images, but deepfakery has almost certainly increased the prevalence as well as the degree of image-burnishing.
And it’s not as if only old farts see this sort of thing as problematic. From Futurism:
Of the nearly 1,300 total participants between the ages of 16 to 21 years old, 68 percent said they feel worse after spending time on social media. A full 50 percent said they would support a “social media curfew” cutting off how long they could spend on these apps. And astonishingly, another 47 percent outright felt that they would prefer to be living their youth in a world without the internet at all….
Merely using social media may itself be a source of misery: a recent study which followed 12,000 preteens as they grew up to become teenagers over the course of three years, found that as their social media usage went up, so did their depression symptoms.
Now it’s not as if the message that young adults have to compete with un- or almost un-attainable notions of beauty is the source of social media angst. But it’s certainly a significant component.
The Washington Post article on AI beauty advice does soon enough get to the point that AI is going to apply Internet beauty standards, and that will lead to Internet (or more accurately, fashion and beauty product vendors and plastic surgeons) norms of facial and physical attractiveness.2 In other words, ChatGPT will amplify what these industries are selling, since they dominate fashion and beauty publishing, and their tastes propagate from Hollywood runways to elite parties to TV and movie casting, which in turn feed back into plastic surgery procedures. These industries profit by making women dissatisfied with their looks.3 One of many proofs: women are less happy after having looked at a fashion magazine.
But let’s go back to the headline question, which is not about beauty but “hotness” as in sexual attractiveness to men. That often has way way less to do with looks than the fashion crowd and claques of women would have you believe. But first let’s start with the opener, which like the headline, confuses magnetism and charisma with conventional beauty:
Ania Rucinski was feeling down on herself.
She’s fine-looking, she says, but friends are quick to imply that she doesn’t measure up to her boyfriend — a “godlike” hottie. Those same people would never tell her what she could do to look more attractive, she adds. So Rucinski, 32, turned to a unconventional source for the cold, hard truth: ChatGPT.
She typed in the bot’s prompt field, telling it she’s tired of feeling like the less desirable one and asking what she could do to look better. It said her face would benefit from curtain bangs.
Lordie, Anita needs to realize her “friends” are not her friends. Or at least not with respect to hunky men. They are competitors. Anything they say on that front is suspect. She needs to tell them to shut the fuck up about her relationship unless she solicits their advice.
They are jealous and hope to enforce their status pecking order, in which Anita has snagged a boyfriend above what they deem to be her station. They’ve already gotten her depressed over having a great catch! , Her anxiety about her man will hopefully get her acting weird enough around him to drive him away. Mind you, this is not a worked-out strategy, but it is remarkable to see how many women are reflexively adept at planting ideas that are relationship poisoners.
Now putting aside this particular example, there are a lot of complaints from young men that young women overvalue themselves, so perhaps some AI narcissism-deflation could be beneficial. But that’s not the big issue here.
Let’s eviscerate this “Conventional attractiveness is the be-all and end all in the romantic pursuit game” nonsense.
At the rich man level as in the sort who can readily have a gorgeous paramour, there are famous examples of not-considered-beautiful women getting their pick of the crop. One was Pamela Harriman, who even in her youth was not considered to be all that attractive. However, she allegedly did have lovely breasts, and for many men, that is what matters (that impression is reinforced by the pervasiveness of boob jobs).4 But she was the courtesan of her day, with her allure rooted in her extreme attentiveness to her partners’ wishes and needs. That was rumored to include being very skilled in bed.
Another example is a story I read in an online magazine (Vice? Salon?) about a very fat woman who had no trouble finding lovers. Her current one was an Adonis-like man. Her secret, according to him, was that she really liked her body and really liked sex.
Now a lot of men like voluptuous women, which is very much at odds with what magazines and movies would have you believe. Regardless, fashion and society-induced body neurosis probably is not good for sexual satisfaction.
There are also men and women who look better in animation than repose, something that ChatGPT would not capture. And that can go as far as magnetism. See this interview with Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson. There’s no fancy lighting. Swindon has on very little makeup. She has bags under her eyes. Many would deem her strong bone structure to be mannish.
Perhaps it’s just me, but even before she speaks, she’s got a charisma that makes it hard to keep your eyes off her.5 No wonder she won an Oscar:
Yet one more possibility is the willingness to be seen. Bear with me on this.
Back in the days when the Internet social media was usenet groups, a friend had a stripper as a partner (this in New York City, where legal strip clubs were not in the business of prostitution; bouncers would throw out any patron who touched the girls and would escort them into cabs at the end of the evening). She had been a professional ballerina but took to stripping to pay her student debt. Because she could dance very well, her hauls were good despite her not having what was considered in that line of work to be a very commercial body (as in she was small breasted).
At her club, one stripper consistently out-earned the rest despite being neither a terrific dancer nor having what was considered to be a great body for stripping. One evening, the disparity was so great that the ballerina manque sputtered to her boyfriend about it.
She was a good physical mimic, so he asked her to dance like the big producer.
After a few minutes of study, he said, “She gives men permission to look at her.”
Now back to the Post and ChatGPT:
One TikTok video asking ChatGPT for glow-up recommendations drew more than 220,000 views and a slew of positive comments. A commenter said the bot rated their attractiveness on a 10-point scale.
“It told me I am mid and could go from a five to a seven with the help of makeup and fillers,” they said.
While ChatGPT maker OpenAI doesn’t publicly share what data its AI systems are trained on, the training data probably includes online forums where people rank other people’s attractiveness (largely men rating women), such as the subreddit r/RateMe or the website Hot or Not, said Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute.
While the training data contains diverse ideas, chatbots tend to veer toward the most common threads — such as the conviction that women need to constantly improve their looks, Hanna said.
And you might have this sort of thing foisted on you:
OpenAI said this month that it’s updating ChatGPT to show products — including images, details and links — when users appear to be shopping. Some tech and beauty experts caution that the bot’s suggestions serve its maker’s goals, not the user’s.
AI companies need new streams of revenue — some are spending billions to build and host AI tools. Having chatbots surface sponsored products and ads is one potential path forward: Already, Perplexity AI has incorporated a shopping feature inside its chatbot’s interface, and beauty is the third-most-searched category, a spokesman said.
As shopping features roll out, consumers might start seeing product recommendations without knowing why the bot is choosing those products, says Forrester’s Pfeiffer. The bot could, for example, pull ideas from a knowledgeable YouTube makeup influencer or a misogynistic Reddit thread. It could invent a fake product or make false claims about a real one, she said. Its training data is so vast and opaque, the bot becomes vulnerable to bias and mistakes.
Consider this example:
Michaela Lassig, a 39-year-old in Washington state, asked ChatGPT to help her glow up before her wedding. In her prompt, she told the bot her goals (flawless, youthful skin), her budget ($2,500) and her timeline…
It spat out a detailed list of the signs of aging on her face. But in the end, she welcomed the recommendations — it even correctly estimated the units of Botox her injector would recommend.
But AI training sets won’t include this sort of warning, from IM Doc:
I would guess in the entire USA, there are 10-15 maybe 20 plastic surgeons that are artists – sculptors. They do just amazing things. These surgeons are just astronomically expensive. And this is where these stars go. This is a very demanding specialty. I knew one of them very well back as a resident….These people are artist like in their behavior – very eccentric and at times bizarre, they are often on the spectrum – and very difficult to deal with – but WOW do they get results – just amazing work. But it costs millions.
The issue is the Botox. Botox, the first few times or when used sparingly, is not quite as good as sculpting – but does amazing things. Accordingly, people use it way too often. The problem is that people quickly find out that used too often it makes the muscles very flabby. It then has to be used more often and before long we have entered a death spiral. After a while, Botox becomes largely or completely ineffective. Then because things are so flabby, fillers and other desperate measures have to be taken. And not even the very best surgeons can fix this.
Botox is an addictive thing – and the Botox face is unmistakeable. And once it finally collapses and not being repleted constantly, things become very desperate indeed.
Can you imagine what dumb ideas ChatGPT would have for Tilda Swindon? “Grow your hair at least to jaw length and wear blush, eye liner and mascara. Oh, and if you have the money, some filler for your lips too.”
Jeff Bezos’ wife Lauren Sanchez shows where you wind up if you have money and fall victim to plastic-surgeon-enabled notions of what to do to fight aging (she’s 56):
Mind you, this isn’t the worst version of operation-created cat eyes and overplump lips….but I have to think she looks even more artificial when she uses her face.
Or consider Madonna, where the gossip rags depict her present appearance as the result of not merely trying to reduce the appearance of aging, but seeking to look as if she’s still in her 20s:
But then again…these distorted faces may become normalized as more and more women get plastic surgery beyond the point of maximum advantage. And it may even become a status marker, since weird-looking fake youthful is better than aged, right?
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1 But far from exclusively, see the rise in body dysmorphia among men. This includes among the very rich, where for instance plastic surgery on their private parts is not uncommon.
2 The article speculates that the AI trained on sites where people rate appearances, and that is mainly men of women. But given that AI is endemically short on training sets and that male and female tastes are influenced by movies and advertising, commercial influence would seem to be strong.
3 In fairness, in cities like New York, London, and Paris, there is a “fashion forward” cohort that must be seen only in the current looks. While as individuals, they spend a lot, and some are high profile enough to drive mass fashion, the weight of dollars is comes from the influenced, not the influencers. And making them insecure about their looks will drive more consumption, particularly on cosmetics and “treatments.”
4 This also implies that Anita could be a catch due to her endowments, which her “friends” are not prepared to accept.
5 Yes, it may also be her gender-bending. She was married to Jonathan Byrne and now has a male partner but recently said she identifies as queer.
