The day will come when we have illuminating whole body mirrors on our walls and they can give us recommendations on what to wear, how to style our hair, what accesories to use and how our makeup looks. But the day is not yet here and today it requires a bit self esteem to ask an assesment from AI about how you look. I don’t recommend it.
Midjourney is one of the two AI tools I have decided to pay to use. The second one is the one that is called ”pathological liar” by some – you probably guessed from that reference that I am talking about – Bard now called Gemini. I mention it for a reference for what is to come in this article. Bugle up, here we go.
Someone without sense of self preservation or is from a good distance from me might agree. I have two jawlines, my face is bloated, I have no neck and my hair is losing its artificial red color. I’ve taken the photo on purpose without any filters and from an angle that is almost most unflattering I can use – at least one that I can do just for a demonstration on a public place without calling too much attention to myself. But fat and ugly? And from a mouth of impartial AI? Soul crushing – should I now go and end my days, curl up and weep, no man one will ever love or want me because I am fat and ugly!
I’m actually happy and impressed, it gendered me correctly as a woman without seeing breasts or makeup. I could have ended up as an alien, horse or a man. And if I use one of the descriptions the AI gave me the result is a bit unexpected.
She is cute, I would date her, provided that our personalities matched. She is smiling and seems happy. I would not call her ugly nor consider her fat.
One of things in this modern world that had worried me even before of an emergence of so called AI is what I call corruption of the baseline or basereference. I’ve written about this before and I will proably keep yabbing about it until the day I die. This time I will try to make the point through personal developement and history.
When I was a kid the most beautiful girl I knew was Anu. She lived next door and was 7 years old or Jonna who lived a few doors over. Then came Krista and Ninni both from the same elementary school and from the same class. At the sixth or seventh grade the world grew and the reference to compare myself to other people and their achievements expanded but it was still mostly against Finnish people. And this was through magazines and television. I had a notion that those people in the magazines and in the television got there because of their exceptional attributes and comparing myself to them meant elevating myself or my skills/talents to their class. And being an average student on the same class with exceptionally talented youth had made it clear to me that I wasn’t exceptional in any single thing. But it had also grown me a self esteem and perspective that can shatter diamonds. I had also already traveled to several countries and had seen regular people from there and observed that most of us are average all over the world and that is fine.
But today you are constantly bombarded by pictures of beautifull people and with amazing talents and skills all over the world. At the same time you are positively told that if you just lift yourself up from your shoelaces you can be anything and that everyone is exceptionally good at something – you just need to find that something. The limits of what a human being can do, look like and be are constantly expanded but at the same time reaching those limits can be achieved by even smaller number of people. We are bombarded by messages and images that define ”normality”, ”beauty”, ”intelligence” and give us life goals to reach. And there are people that gain wealth and power while we try to pursue those goals. Trying to be something you can’t and trying to pursue something that you don’t actually want or can’t reach thrives people to depression and makes life harder. The references have become corrupted and muddy. There is no clear universal baseline you should compare yourself to.
The only thing you ever need to be is you – whatever that is on whichever day, you decide. It is your life and it will end too soon however you live it. When you are gone the only two measurements that matter are the people’s memory of you and number of your regrets. Do they miss you or are they relieved to see you finally go? It doesn’t matter if you conquered Ukraine, made 221 goals in one season on some sports or won the miss Universum contest if most of the people are just happy that you are gone. And even that doesn’t matter if your last thought before dying was that you lived most of your time someone else’s life.
When you are reading the so called AI descriptions of yourself and it gives assessments of your beauty or weight then the first thing you need to remember that it isn’t an intelligence. It is not sentient and it has been ”taught” by using internet. It has no notion of ”truth”, ”beauty” and doesn’t actually objectively know when to label someone fat. Most of the internet is about questionable content. The pictures that promote beauty and fitness are exceptional examples. Midjourney has gone trough millions of celebrity, commercial and magazine/blog photos where people try to look their best and are promoted for their beauty. It most likely has found millions of pictures that are used to shame and bully normal looking people. Ugly is a term that most likely has been associated on ”evil” purposes to pictures that aren’t. If you don’t believe me, then think by yourself. How likely is it that there is a scientifically or aesthetically curated gallery of ugly women? How likely is it that someone teaching Midjourney bot has actually given that as corpus? How likely is it compared of some disappointed men who got turned down and had posted a normal looking women to the internet to shame them for some twisted revenge or self elevation?
This is how I would describe myself today for Midjourney
I like the last picture most but I will never have as beautiful neck or narrow shoulders.
Fuula-täti 