Reaching the BEAUTY Phenomenon

Beauty has changed throughout time, due to the various cultures and the vast different perceptions of the world. Beauty has been described and depicted through pictures on social media and concepts penetrating minds in our everyday life. Beauty has been defined in so many ways, although nowadays even AI may identify beauty by itself creating an absolutely different reality.

In recent years standards of beauty were cardinally rethought with the help of Alessandro Michele and Demna Gvasalia, who conquered the fashion system proposing a new unconventional beauty. But now a Berlin based group of enthusiasts SELAM X has created another way of going beyond the traditional rules.

Their newborn is called Beauty_GAN where GAN stands for generative adversarial network. The tech goes through different collected images taken from Instagram and then by categorising beauty pictures also produces new ones without any help from a human. The main idea is that it is actually not one AI system, but two adversarial AI competitors: generator and discriminator. The generator tries to create fake images that look as closely as possible to the original sample images. And the discriminator tries basically find out which of the images are forge and which are original, so the two components of the system train one each other.

“We fed one part of the whole Beauty_GAN structure with images from instagram. Instead of saying “okay, I defined this realm what counts as a beauty image” - we just let AI decide by itself.” - says Lucas Rudig, art director of SELAM X.

Through the centuries we, human beings, were taught by society how beauty should appear. All that information will remain forever in our subconsciousness. But the tech is not a replication of features, it’s truly learned what a beauty selfie based on our photos accepting every categorized as a beauty one.

Lucas Rudig explains, why the system outputs a video and always changes because: “In the latent space there are very close matches to one another that is distinguishable for a human eye, so if we stitch those together they appear as a video to us.”

Looking at beauty_GAN results you may consider them look like an artwork, like a masterpiece, but still created by AI using zero human creativity in process. If previously fashion industry was proposing us the way we should look and “how beautiful enough” we should feel, now we can forget about that limitations.

All in all, AI is becoming not just a machine or a tool, which is useful to help and serve people, AI imitates the real process of learning showing even better results than humans could ever have shown. What is happening now gives us an example how wrong we were putting labels and creating beauty templates which everyone should adhere. The Beauty_GAN shows people how we could behave without any borders or limits implementing experience of knowledge we haven’t seen before.