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from the the-very-concept-of-beauty-is-part-of-the-entrenched-patriarchy dept.
For over a year, I worked as a beauty editor, writing and researching about the products, trends, and people that make us want to look a certain way. And as research for many of the stories I wrote, I consulted with dermatologists, plastic surgeons, makeup artists, aestheticians, and more trying to answer a simple question—how can I make myself more conventionally attractive?
"Beauty is confidence," they'd always say, prefacing the real answer. Inevitably, these experts would eventually tell me that you feel more confident, and thus more beautiful, when you look blemish- and wrinkle-free. (Pending on the product they were promoting, this could also incorporate being tanner, or more contoured, or thinner, or paler, or less made up, or curvier, etc.) Regardless of respondents' different aesthetic tastes, everyone seemed to agree—younger is more beautiful. Beauty was about anti-aging.
Naturally, the problem here is the premise. What is beauty beyond someone else defining it? For as long as humanity's obsession with the term has existed, we've equally known about its subjective nature. After all, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is merely a cliché that posits that exact subjectivity of attractiveness.
But what if the beholder can eliminate subjectivity—what if the beholder wasn't a person, but an algorithm? Using machine learning to define beauty could, theoretically, make beauty pageants and rankings like People's annual Most Beautiful in the World list more objective and less prone to human error. Of course, teaching an algorithm to do anything may involve some bias from whoever does the programming, but that hasn't stopped this automated approach from defining equally subjective things like listening preferences or news value (we see you, Facebook et al).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @11:22PM (4 children)
Sorry, but that's the dumbest use of AI I've seen in a while. Beauty is supposed to be subjective, and we want human judges because it's largely an entertainment endeavor.
It's like going to a bar to hear a robot play the piano because "it's more accurate than a person".
(Sure, mechanical "player pianos" have been in bars for eons, but that's mostly to save money, not improve customer experience, other than maybe for kids who like the watch the mechanisms run.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @11:44PM (1 child)
It they didn't improve customer experience then they simply wouldn't be present at all*, saving even more money!
It's also worth nothing that people /do/ value the increased accuracy machines bring to music, that's why people prefer queen recordings as opposed to some shitty local cover band.
*Unless your country has laws effectively forcing bars to include music, maybe to make them a dance hall or something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @06:02AM
I meant improve customer experience above a human entertainer. And there is a place and time for machines, but a beauty pageant judge isn't one of them.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 21 2017, @02:29AM (1 child)
I agree with AC on this one. Some of the "most beautiful women" found in the media aren't especially attractive to me. (Kardashian? PUHLEASE!!) Often times, some little imperfection adds to a woman's attractiveness. The eye of the beholder is everything. No algorithm is going to determine who any individual is going to be attracted to. It may produce some pretty impressive average results, but it isn't going to always be right.
We really don't need to make everything in our lives digital.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @06:07AM
I agree, pageant winners are on the bland side. That's perhaps a result of judging by committee, giving a highest average score but nothing that knocks one's socks off.