Sexy according to algorithm: the new aesthetic created by those who watch us

This woman does not exist. Yet you can’t stop looking at her.

This will be a non-technical article for those who are approaching or want to know more about artificial intelligence. Within a few years, AI has learned to generate images of women that are so realistic, seductive and perfectly composed that they can be mistaken for real models. But how does a machine, devoid of emotions, desires or sensory experience, understand what it means to “be sexy” to the point of actually generating an image that evokes this status?

The answer is in the data

AI does not wish to … It calculates; and to do so, it has seen millions of images, from Renaissance portraits to selfies on Instagram, from early Playboy covers to fashion photographs. Every curve, every pose, every look, has been broken down into vectors, metrics, weights and statistical correlations. When you ask the AI to create a photo of a sexy woman, the algorithm doesn’t invent anything, it merely reassembles the global average desire.

The picture we get is therefore an average of traits, physical proportions, breast size, makeup, etc. that fall within the average desire of people in the world.

This obviously raises a philological issue…

Who decides what is sexy and what is not?

“Beauty is subjective,” how many of you have never heard this phrase? It is said so many times that it is now considered to be self-evident, true no matter what.

I disagree! Because if beauty were truly subjective, then we would also have to accept the idea that a person universally recognized as beautiful could be called ugly. But no. There are limits, even to subjectivity.

We take our Monica Bellucci at the height of her beauty.

If beauty were subjective this would mean that there would have to be someone in the world capable of believing that Bellucci could be given the appellation “Ugly.”

I understand that there may be people who, whether out of personal preference or dislike, may prefer other types of beauty. There are those who may prefer a blonde, there are those who may prefer smaller or even larger breasts, but to call Bellucci as “Ugly” may only be a sign of envy (if pronounced by females) or dislike (if pronounced by males) but in reality both know that Monica Bellucci is anything but ugly.

By this reasoning I derive that the subjectivity of aesthetics exists with certain limitations. We brought the example of Bellucci, but we could have talked about Angelina Jolie, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Charlize Theron, as for other male aesthetic reference points such as Gabriel Garko, Paul Newman, Alain Delon, Henry Cavill, etc. etc. True aesthetics is in my opinion something objective: the “beautiful” is beautiful by definition.

Then there is also a statistical reason…. If 99% of the world’s population identifies aesthetic sense in a person, then that person can be said to retain objective aesthetic characteristics.

Beauty according to AI

Who, then, decides what is sexy when it is a machine watching us that creates it? We are the ones who decide it. We are the ones who educate the algorithm, and the AI merely returns a mirror to us: it shows us the traits of what is statistically considered sexiest by most of the world. An AI-generated woman is a collective portrait of our unconscious taste.

Beauty, they used to say, is in the eye of the beholder. But today those eyes are digital and learn fast!

Sexy According to Algorithm is a journey into a new aesthetic: made of prompts, neural networks, and desires that we can no longer distinguish from reality.

How about you? Do you really think beauty is subjective? Or has artificial intelligence revealed something we don’t want to admit?

Because this woman does not exist, but she still seduces us.

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