Etkileşim (Oct 2022)
Camouflage - Exploring the AI-Generated Beauty Ideal
Abstract
The retouching and altering of portrait photographs used to require extreme professionalism from the artists, thus it was a privilege for photographers. However, thanks to modern image editing techniques, the process has become completely automated, to the point where it is no longer uncommon to find artificial intelligence-based software to perform portrait editing. The present research uses a self-report questionnaire to investigate the functioning of an image editing software that uses artificial intelligence to anatomically transform portrait photos beautiful at one push of a button. Participants are asked to give their opinions on pairs of photographs, one of which is an original, unedited picture, meanwhile the other is its idealised version created by the artificial intelligence-based software. The results of the research showed that the viewer's perception of automatic image retouching was not influenced by the gender or age of the model, nor by the age of the recipients. However, the participants’ first judgement of the models’ beauty influenced their attitude towards both the model and the photograph. In most cases, the photo version that participants considered more beautiful was the one they would have preferred to see both in their own social media news feed and on the cover of a magazine, furthermore, more people would have preferred to meet the model based on the photo they thought to be beautiful. The research also reveals that viewers tend to associate negative emotions with image manipulation. Although the enhancement of photographs is a phenomenon that media users regularly encounter, not much research have been conducted on the ideal of beauty in relation to AI-technology. The current study aims to contribute to filling the aforementioned research gap.
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