AI Secrets is your new weekly update on how AI is changing our everyday lives. Our experts will keep it clear and simple, so you can stay ahead of the game. This week we’re looking at beauty.Share this with anyone you want to keep up to date.
Old glamor vs Bold glamour 💋📱
It’s the glitziest weekend of the year! The Academy Awards are on Sunday, but even the red carpet looks set to be upstaged by the week’s biggest glamor story; the new TikTok filter, Bold Glamour.
Social media filters that alter your phone’s video are nothing new, but Bold Glamour takes the trend in a worrying direction. Rather than crudely superimposing cartoonish graphics on your face, the new filter delivers a highly convincing real-time glow-up, altering your appearance to remove imperfections while shaping up your facial features. It’s effectively a live deepfake of an alternate, better you, on your phone.
The filter has gone viral on TikTok, but much of the attention has been negative. Influencers on the service are shocked by how effective Bold Glamour is and deeply concerned about the impact it will have on women and girls who are already struggling to conform to impossible beauty standards. One shocking example features a user who states (with the filter turned on), ”I don’t think my brain knows how to deal with looking like this one minute, and then (as she turns the filter off) - this the next”.
The majority of TikTok’s users are women, with two-thirds aged 24 or under. Multiple studies have shown that services like TikTok and Instagram place huge pressure on young women to look perfect and present an idealized life to their followers, and this pressure frequently leads to increased anxiety and depression. Bold Glamour seems certain to escalate that pressure, and the outcry it has provoked has been considerable.
One curious wrinkle in this controversy is TikTok’s refusal to admit that the filter uses AI at all. The Vergecontacted TikTok to enquire about the technology used in Bold Glamour but was ignored. It’s not hard to see why TikTok is keeping its heads down; US legislators are seeking to ban the service - which they view as a threat to national security - and the social media firm’s newfound ability to install reality-distorting AI tech on smartphones is unlikely to help the case for the defense. Despite TikTok’s silence, experts are certain that Bold Glamour uses one of the leading forms of the new generations of AIs, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), to create its output; to learn more, don’t miss our essential explainer on these networks!
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