why I am (probably) never going to use Lensa
maybe you don't want to, either
I am deeply worried about the sudden shift we’re seeing from complaining about language models’ brittleness to wanting to deeply integrate them into our economy and critical infrastructure.
But here, I want to write about something less economic in nature. The advent of Photoshop and digital editing technologies have allowed us to touch up photos, to make images of people look better than the real people behind those images. Photoshop and similar technologies are often used ironically, but there is a very real way in which partially-invented faces and bodies have warped our senses of what’s attractive, what’s attainable, how we look.
Lensa is an AI-powered image editing app that promises to “take your photos to the next level.” It calls its facial retouching features “Magic Correction,” offers you tools to perfect your facial “imperfections.” It really levels up what you can do with Photoshop and similar tools, and you don’t have to put much work in yourself.
I can understand why Lensa and similar apps are so popular—they can make you look so cool. They’ll give you that chiseled jawline you always dreamed of, the sunken cheeks everyone seems to want. They’ll immortalize the hairdo you can’t quite get with your real hair on an avatar’s face that looks just like yours.
Perhaps you’re starting to see why I don’t like this very much: Lensa is giving you something more personal than an unrealistic figure or face you might want to aspire to. It’s you. It’s the perfect you—closer to home than the blemish-less Harry and Hermione that Ron vanquished with a horcrux. I think that using apps like Lensa is going to have a large impact on our self-perceptions—perhaps one larger than Instagram and its ilk.
the effects of comparison
There isn’t much reason to belabor a point that’s already been kicked to death—Instagram and filtered photos have had deleterious impacts on many people’s mental health. These effects have been described both anecdotally and in studies. And the effects of dissatisfaction with one’s face or body can have real and long-lasting effects on a person’s self-perception and behavior.
I should know—I dealt with two extremes of an eating disorder in my last few years of high school. A fatalism about my weight drove me to binge eating of proportions that I’m loathe to even describe. When I finally managed to act on my commitment to lose weight in the second half of my senior year, I ate fewer than 500 calories a day for months, subsisting on foods like cabbage soup and celery until I shed over a quarter of my body weight.
My self-image didn’t have time to catch up with the drop in weight; it was extremely odd to me that the people I met in college didn’t think I was overweight. Every time someone called me “big guy”—probably a comment on my height—it felt like a personal affront and caused me to be very careful about my eating for the next day. My obsessive preoccupation with food remained, but for a different reason.
And much of this was driven by the fact that my stomach always looked too “pudgy” to me, that my face sometimes looked bloated, that what I saw in the mirror didn’t quite look like what I had come to believe constituted “good-looking.” For a younger Daniel who didn’t yet know how to package and isolate his desire to look a certain way, comparison was both motivating and extremely unhealthy.
back to Lensa
That’s probably more than enough about my weight struggles—what is important here is that the negative effects of unrealistic beauty standards are already well known and documented, and faces and bodies “perfected” by AI systems seem like they’re going to take this to a new level.
What happens when people who’ve never met me have only seen my AI-generated profile photo, then meet me in real life? What happens when I start to identify with my AI-generated photos and have to experience the cognitive dissonance that might happen every time I see my real face in the mirror?
If we didn’t need aggressively retouched photos of celebrities and people around us to make us feel worse about ourselves, we really don’t need easily-generated, hyper-idealized images of ourselves to bring that same feeling even closer to home.
The idea of beauty standards aside, I think we’re finding easier and easier ways to avoid confronting the reality of our own limitations, of our own “imperfections.” Why do the hard work of keeping yourself well-groomed when your AI-generated profile photos will look perfect, no matter what you do with yourself?
I don’t know and won’t claim that the existence of AI-generated photos will cause people to neglect their actual faces and bodies, but I worry about our deep identification with our online personas and what happens when those online personas include deep likenesses of ourselves.
self-dissonance
Bizarre glitches and misogyny beside (these are serious issues that should not be papered over, but others have considered them in depth and they’re not my focus here), I worry about the ease of self-dissonance that we might be running towards. Makeup and re-touching is one thing—endowing your face with every feature you’ve ever wanted is another.
There’s certainly a view that this could be motivating—“I should work really hard to look like that!”—but I’m less optimistic about this than I’d like to be. Fitness motivation videos show you someone who is often a lot farther along the road than you are, but also display the intense effort it took to get there. A touched-up or AI-generated self-portrait doesn’t do the same.
I don’t know if I have a better conclusion here than “don’t use this if you’re worried about your self-image”—however you or I feel about it, many people will use these tools and they’ll continue to be developed. Many people will use these tools and not suffer mental health effects, and that’s fantastic.
I’m confident that using Lensa wouldn’t drive me down a hole of self-loathing, either. But I’d rather not forget what my real face looks like. There’s a way in which everything that comes out of these generations starts to look the same, to look too “perfect,” to look boring.
One thing that Proust and other writers taught me was the depth in judgement-free observation. It’s easy to look at a person and ascribe a broad label to describe how they look: attractive, fair, intimidating. There’s something to these immediate feelings that shouldn’t be dismissed, but it can be so much more interesting to examine from the bottom up, to notice how features hang together.
It’s easy to say “reserve judgement,” but it’s hard to act on that ideal. “Magic Correction” doesn’t afford you the space to observe without judgement—there’s already something incorrect that you need to fix. This might have been a really roundabout way to a conclusion that we should notice what we have rather than what we lack, but I think it was worth the extra words. I’ll stick with real photos for now.
selection of things consumed and thoughts
“A Critic’s Manifesto” in The New Yorker from 2012
can’t believe I hadn’t read this before. beautiful perspective on the function of the critic in an area, the role in society. the critic in The Recognitions kind of plays a gatekeeping role that prevents Wyatt from getting his painting career off the ground (the promise is, for a fee, Wyatt could receive a good review). and that’s certainly a feature we often notice in criticism.
I think the critic as a lover of an art, as a teacher who trains readers in the art of appreciation, is a great ideal: “the critic is someone who, when his knowledge, operated on by his taste in the presence of some new example of the genre he’s interested in—a new TV series, a movie, an opera or ballet or book—hungers to make sense of that new thing, to analyze it, interpret it, make it mean something.”
“Age, Sex, Location” in Longreads
“The End of Love” in The Paris Review
geez, really speaks to some of the exhaustion of whatever “finding love” is supposed to mean now
excerpts from Plato’s Symposium because machine love is too interesting of an idea
I feel like a lot of the ideas in Symposium are rather well-known now, but especially the speech of Diotima is really good to return to.
“On Fairy Stories” by J.R.R. Tolkien
readings from Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Scepticism
“The Kyoto School: An Introduction” by Robert E. Carter
I am thinking a lot about… systematizing, and cosmological arguments, and analogues in epistemology/ethics and whether epistemology is actually just a waste of time because of tilting towards skepticism and arguments like those in Sextus, which (according to J. Kreines) leave you free to do actually interesting things off in metaphysics land.
I’m curious about The Kyoto School’s foregrounding of nothingness as a central feature of its metaphysics and how that relates to… weakness of the cosmological argument, possible tilting of metaphysics towards nihilism, issues / possible incognizability of a self-causing thing.
the ontological argument for being is really really really weird. think about the idea of being, unqualified—it’s being. it can’t not be. someone could just say: “if you think ‘being’ isn’t, then you clearly didn’t understand what I’m talking about… if you know what being is, then you know that it is.” this is basically what those who make an ontological argument for God always say—that doesn’t feel convincing if you’re not already on board, but when you talk about “pure being” or something similar it feels more weird.
ANOTHER Hilary Hahn performance of Sibelius I literally couldn’t do anything for like 30 minutes after listening to this
Locatelli Violin Concerto No.12 'Il Laberinto Armonico'
Lots of things by Ted Underwood
“Portrait of René Girard as a Post-Hegelian: Masters, Slaves, and Monstrous Doubles”
really really interesting way of fitting Girard in among the thinkers who were trying to escape Hegel. again works off the Kojève reading where you’re really getting more Kojève than Hegel, but Girard’s criticism that Hegel doesn’t truly contend with the depth and centrality of violence as part of the human condition is interesting. “In a nutshell, Girard’s issue with Hegel is that he perceives the idea of a philosophical Reason entirely detached from violence and conflict as misleading, utopic and, eventually, dangerous.”
that Girard is a powerful critic of Hegel, I’m not sure. the Kyoto School, above, in its foregrounding of nothingness in metaphysics, kind of prevents the Phenomenology from getting off the ground in the articulation of pure, unmediated experience as the only way of contact with reality. Hegel tells us immediate experience cannot count as knowledge since it can’t be articulated, can’t be communicated—we can merely say this and here to describe what presents itself to us in its immediacy. Kyoto School thinkers kind of take this head on and just say “yes that’s what there really is.”
I need to read the primary sources more, but wonder: a key feature of Kyoto School thinking is the interconnectedness of human beings, the self that is other or the letting go of the self as divided from others. but pure perception leaves us with sensations that can only present themselves to our senses—we are left only with our own interiority.
I don’t think we can refute Hegel that we can’t communicate these immediate sensations without imposing representations and labels. does that problematize the drive for interconnectedness somehow, by forcing us into irreconcilable worlds of our own experience? or is all “pure experience” supposed to be the same, prior to our individual representations, and does that connect us together? but people have things like color-blindness, etc. I don’t know if “pure experience” can be the same for everyone, unless you fix a lot of things that seem biologically impossible to render static. i am confused
a plug: I finally talked to Ken Liu!! recorded in January / release a month ago, huge fanboy moment
word snake
Honey, you're familiar like my mirror years ago
Idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on its sword
Innocence died screaming, honey, ask me I should know
I slithered here from Eden just to sit outside your door
~ “From Eden” by Hozier
I find this to be a slightly weird take - Lensa does not only give us an 'idealized' representation of ourselves, as per your first image it gives very stylized remixes of what you look like with different themes and whatnot. And so it's actually pretty distinct from beauty filters (which I do think are bad) - the fantastical (or even just illustrative, rather than photorealistic) nature of the images seems like it would make it easy not to identify with them too much.
Also, sorry to hear about your weight struggles. I was also overweight for most of high school and was a bit touchy on the topic in my 20s, though not to a huge extent. Cool that you progressed beyond that self image.