ArticleCorner Journal 📝

When AI Changes Our Perception of Beauty
Today, I spent almost the entire day watching AI generated music videos and images. I was not looking for anything in particular. One video led to another, and before I knew it, hours had passed. The music was beautiful, the scenes were beautiful, and the people in those videos looked almost impossibly attractive.

The women especially caught my attention. Perfect faces, perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect lighting, perfect expressions. Nothing looked out of place. At first, I simply enjoyed watching them. There was nothing strange about it. It was just another way of creating entertainment with artificial intelligence.

But after several hours, I started thinking about something that had nothing to do with the music. What happens to our perception when we spend too much time looking at things that do not exist?

An AI can create a woman with almost any face we want. It can remove imperfections, change proportions, improve skin, alter lighting and create an image that looks more attractive than most people could ever look in ordinary life. And the strange thing is that we know it is artificial, yet our eyes still respond to it.

We do not look at an AI generated face and say, “This is mathematically impressive.” We simply see a beautiful person.

That made me wonder about what happens after hundreds or thousands of images like this. Our eyes are constantly being trained by what we look at. If we keep seeing extraordinary beauty every day, perhaps extraordinary beauty slowly becomes ordinary to us. And once that happens, ordinary beauty may begin to feel less impressive.

I thought about this when I imagined walking outside after spending the whole day in front of those videos. The people on the street would still look exactly the same as they did yesterday. Their faces would have the small imperfections that every real person has.

Someone might have tired eyes. Someone might have messy hair. Someone might have a little mark on their skin or simply be having a bad day. None of these things make a person less human. In fact, they are part of what makes a real person real.

But what if our expectations begin to change?

Perhaps the problem is not that AI makes beautiful people. Beauty has always been part of art, photography, cinema and advertising. The difference is that AI can produce an endless supply of idealized people at almost no effort.

There is no model who gets tired, no photographer waiting for the right moment, no makeup artist, no studio and no physical limitation. The machine can simply keep creating another perfect face, and then another one, and another.

That could eventually affect much more than the way we look at other people. We could start comparing our homes with AI generated homes, our holidays with impossible AI landscapes, our bodies with artificial bodies, our relationships with fictional relationships and even our lives with lives that were never lived by anyone.

Maybe that is where the real danger begins.

AI does not necessarily have to lie to us. It may simply show us things that are too perfect, too beautiful and too easy to create. If we spend enough time looking at that world, we may start carrying its standards back into the real one.

And real life cannot compete with an unlimited imagination.

A real woman will sometimes wake up tired. A real man will have a bad haircut. A real house will have something broken. A real sunset may be hidden behind clouds. A real relationship will have disagreements. A real photograph will contain moments that are not perfect. None of this is a failure. It is simply life.

Maybe we should be careful about forgetting that.

I am not saying we should stop watching AI videos or stop enjoying beautiful images. I enjoyed them today, and I probably will again. But after spending so many hours inside that artificial world, I noticed something that made me pause.

Perhaps the greatest danger is not that AI will create a fake world. Perhaps it is that the real world may slowly start looking less beautiful to us.

ArticleCorner Journal: The world stays the same. Sometimes, it is our perception that changes.