English artist Gretchen Andrew is using AI technology to «correct» oil portraits of Miss Universe contestants. And it seems that AI «thinks» that people aren’t as perfect as they should be, especially women. What has the artist, who has been working in London for a decade, mostly with computers, learned from this?
English artist Gretchen Andrew is using AI technology to «correct» oil portraits of Miss Universe contestants. And it seems that AI «thinks» that people aren’t as perfect as they should be, especially women. What has the artist, who has been working in London for a decade, mostly with computers, learned from this?
«My work uses the same algorithm, the same process, and instead of subtly moving a pixel to make her arms thinner, her lips bigger or her breasts bigger, she’s randomly moving wet paint. So everywhere these marks show where our bodies don’t agree with what the AI says we should be,» the artist says of her first major exhibition at the new Hope 93 gallery in Fitzrovia, Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty, as the Standard writes .
To make people more attractive, Gretchen Andrew uses the same digital editing process she uses on TikTok, Instagram, and Zoom to edit her portraits. It took her two years to develop the technical and conceptual process. And the most challenging part was creating an AI robot that uses an algorithm she developed with a scientist.
And any beautiful woman, even from Miss Nigeria to Miss Denmark, regardless of nationality or parameters, AI tries to «reshape» into the image it «considers ideal»: similar, Western, thin, pornographic. At the same time, artificial intelligence relies on search queries that are most often found on the Internet.
Gretchen Andrew suggests that this is because the female image has been a bigger marketing product than the male image. «And when there’s a version that can be sold, or something that’s been created and put on the internet, that information is how we got these misconceptions about women,» she adds.
The artist presented her works, which are designed to answer the question: «How technology sees us.» And the «algorithmic view» of AI is alarming, because it seems that machines want to «fix» us, to make us «perfect» people, people as products, the artist adds.
