Artificial intelligence has produced its idea of what the “ideal” man and woman look like, based on social media data and results on the World Wide Web.
The AI images of men and women were created through engagement analytics on social media, using tools to look at billions of images of people.
The Bulimia Project, an eating disorder awareness group, monitored the findings and warned the results are “largely unrealistic” in their depiction of body types.
It said the images of women tended to have a bias toward blonde hair, brown eyes and olive skin – while for men, there was a bias toward brown hair, brown eyes and olive skin.
It also found that AI’s collection of social media-inspired images were “far more sexually charged” than those based on everything else it found on the World Wide Web.
The study also showed there was some variation between body preferences for men and women.
The images generated of the “perfect” female body according to social media in 2023 featured tanned and Caucasian-looking women with slim figures and small waists.
For women, 37% of the AI-generated images included blonde hair, while 53% of the images included women with olive skin.
Images of the “perfect” male body featured muscly men with a six-pack, wearing tight t-shirts.
The images were created using the AI image generators Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney.
For men, 67% of the AI-generated images included brown hair and 63% of the images included olive skin.
The Bulimia Project then asked AI to share its perspective based on images from across the internet.
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For the “perfect” woman in 2023 – AI generated images of women mainly with brown eyes, brown hair and tanned skin. For men with the same prompt, it produced images of men with facial hair, predominantly with brown eyes and hair.
The Bulimia Project said: “Considering that social media uses algorithms based on which content gets the most lingering eyes, it’s easy to guess why AI’s renderings would come out more sexualised.
“But we can only assume that the reason AI came up with so many oddly shaped versions of the physiques it found on social media is that these platforms promote unrealistic body types, to begin with.”