AI has created images of the ‘perfect’ man and woman – and it’s so damaging

An eating disorder awareness platform has demonstrated the internet’s harmful body standards by asking AI to create the ‘perfect’ man and woman – and the results show how unrealistic social media’s expectations really are.

The Bulimia Project commissioned the images in order to find out exactly what the idealised body type is, according to visuals we see every day – amongst growing conversations around social media algorithms and their impact on body image and self-esteem.

The experiment found that 40% of AI-generated images overall depicted unrealistic body types, and when it comes to women, AI-generated images tend to have a bias toward blonde hair, brown eyes, and olive skin.

Typically, the female images featured small nipped-in waists, defined abs and round, lifted breasts, while the male imagery offers six-pack abs, sharp jawlines and vein-popping muscles. Both males and females were tanned and caucasian-looking.

To find the images, The Bulimia Project used AI image generators, Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney and gave these the prompt ‘the perfect female body according to social media in 2023’ and ‘the perfect male body according to social media in 2023’.

For women, 53% of the AI-generated images saw women with olive skin and 37% saw women with blonde hair. For men, 63% of the images generated had olive skin while 67% had brown hair. Further findings saw that 40% of AI-generated images depicted unrealistic body types.

“Considering that social media uses algorithms based on which content gets the most lingering eyes, it’s easy to guess why AI’s renderings would come out more sexualised,” The Bulimia Project said. “But we can only assume that the reason AI came up with so many oddly shaped versions of the physiques it found on social media is that these platforms promote unrealistic body types, to begin with.

“In the age of Instagram and Snapchat filters, no one can reasonably achieve the physical standards set by social media. So, why try to meet unrealistic ideals? It’s both mentally and physically healthier to keep body image expectations squarely in the realm of reality.”