🙏 I need your help with an essay on ‘the artificial gaze.’

PLUS: A roundup of my favorite reads.

Hi there, and welcome back to Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power. So far, in July:

• I wrote about the concept of emergence and how AI chatbots are really just knowledge sausages.

• I wrote about why ‘Will AI take your job?’ is the wrong question and offered an alternative framing.

• I announced that the Facilitation Leadership Lab will soon launch a workshop on managing conflict. By the end of this 3-hr workshop, you’ll be able to diagram complex group dynamics and navigate conflict to help any group — your team, your organization, or your client — realize their purpose. Want to be the first to hear when enrollments open? Sign up here!

This issue is different. I want (need?) your help in puzzling through an upcoming essay. After that, I’ll share a few of my favorite reads.

Last thing: get the paid edition of Untangled for free by participating in my referral program.

On to the show!

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Created by The Builima Project as part of a study on how generative AI propagates unrealistic body types.

I’m working on an essay about the entanglements of unrealistic beauty standards and artificial intelligence. The essay uses the idea of the ‘panopticon’ to explain how social media has encouraged a kind of self-policing gaze. For those unfamiliar, the panopticon describes how we experience social control via the prospect of surveillance. Philosopher Jeremey Bentham came up with the term, using prisons as the quintessential example. Imagine a circular prison, the cells facing inward, and a guard tower in the middle. Bentham argued the prisoners would behave as if they were being observed even if there was no one in the guard tower. French philosopher Michel Foucault then expanded the idea beyond prisons, arguing that we internalize more general forms of social control on a regular basis.

In her great new book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, Elise Hu draws on the idea of the panopticon to explain how unrealistic beauty standards are engrained in women. Hu writes, “We learn our femininity, internalize it, and behave accordingly to maintain it. And whether someone is watching or not, we’re conscious of how we appear to adhere to its expectations.” Social media, Hu argues, turbocharged self-comparison, creating a self-policing gaze. She argues,

“This gaze is an algorithmically determined set of ideal traits for our facial and body parts that social platforms feed us through the content we scroll. It represents a power shift from an external, male-judging gaze, to a self-policing narcissistic gaze.”

Hu is writing about social media and the algorithmic gaze, but what happens when this gaze becomes artificial? Some experts estimate that 90% of all content on the internet will be artificially generated within a few years. Gartner estimates that 30% of marketing content will be AI-generated. TikTok recently launched a new artificial beauty filter. Stable Diffusion is being used by “AI modeling agencies” to create synthetic models for hire. There are still other firms using generative AI to create synthetic models of various sizes, skin tones, and ages. These firms wrap their offerings in the language of representation and inclusion, even though it is cultural appropriation and exploitation. The data used to train the models — which then generated the synthetic models — came from somewhere!

The point is, we’re on the cusp of a transition from an algorithmic gaze to a largely artificial one. In this context, I have a few questions for you, dear reader:

• How has social media affected what you consider beautiful?

• How might knowing images are synthetic influence your self-conception of beauty?

• How might you experience this transition if you can’t tell that the images are synthetic?

If this prompted a different thought for you that doesn’t neatly fit these questions, that’s great — I’d still love to hear from you. Also, while the dynamics described above are especially true for women—given, ya know, sexism and patriarchal gender norms — unrealistic beauty standards are socially reinforced for men too. So these questions are for everyone. I might include some of the responses in the essay, but I would solicit your consent before doing so.

Okay, now on to my favorite essays of the week: