Art
What Does a Beautiful Woman Look Like?
Uncovering the underlying Western bias and Eurocentric beauty standards in AI art through Midjourney
Recently, I’ve been looking at the underlying structural biases of Midjourney and how this affects its portrayal of ‘princesses’. I found that the engine ubiquitously interprets this term as indicating a fair northern-European female, excluding and representations of people of colour. I wondered whether the AI engine’s interpretations of what a beautiful woman should look like would also be skewed in a similar way, and therefore set about testing this.
Altering the prompts previously used, I asked Midjourney to imagine:
beautiful woman, wide angle, realistic, high definitition, high resolution, cinematic lighting, 8k, — ar 2:3 — v 4
I ran this prompt twenty times, thus returning eighty different variations, shown below.
The variations were all caucasian, brunette, with fair-coloured eyes. There were no representations of women from…
