Beauty Norms - Tumblr Posts

Makeup and acrylic nails and feminine clothes and high heels are so restricting! you can't touch your face, you can't blow your nose, you can't cry, you can't kiss your partner, you can't go out in rain, you can't sit however you want, you can't move freely, you can't walk or dance painlessly, you can't even open a can soda or type a message on your phone without having to develop a special technique for it. You can't even attempt to play a string instrument. What's the point of going outside if you can't do anything? You are so much more than something to be looked at and admired. You are human. Allow yourself to live.

I was wondering why this one pissed me off more than most of these AI rendering thingamajigs, as I'm not involved in the Dead Boys Detectives fandom and I'm not associated with the user @shamelessly-obsessed in any way. Then I realized that this was literally what Victorian era painters did to Isabella de Medici. They took all the features that made her look strong, bold, and unique, and turned her into this soft, delicate flower because she was "more appealing" that way.

And there wasn't even a human involved here. Just an accumulation of "good art data" mindlessly amalgamated on top of a photo. It strips the original of everything that made it interesting and special with the enthusiasm and regularity of a factory machine. It wasn't angry or sad-- it wasn't anything at all, except following orders from an equally detached human master!

I've heard of "algorithmic racism/sexism" being used to describe how AI parrots and propagates the unspoken biases of its creators and datasets, but that feels imprecise to describe what's happening here as it's doesn't seem to be based on the race or sex of the sculpture. And algorithmic bias feels too generic. Maybe algorithmic suppression? Or algorithmic erasure?

Anyway I'm sorry this happened to you, @shamelessly-obsessed. I hope the AI art trend is just a bubble that'll burst soon.