Artificial Intelligence has an opinion on what a “perfect” male or female looks like (if you want AI to determine that for you).

It learned from billions of images available on social media sites depicting people perceived as “beautiful” and came up with features of an ideal man and woman.

The Bulimia Project asked AI to produce the ‘perfect’ male and female bodies. Researchers from the organization found that the most desirable women had blonde hair, olive skin, brown eyes, and slim figures, while the ‘perfect’ male had dark, smoldering eyes, chiseled cheekbones, and defined muscles. (We are not sure but strongly suspect, that at the time of posting this story, this was an example of Orientialist or imperialist gaze at work. Edward Said would have much to say about this, we are quite certain.)

Most of the AI results appeared to play up outdated standards of beauty (of the external and not internal kind, and most certainly not of the non-binary kind).

They tested Artificial Intelligence image generators including Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney.

The AI works by scouring the internet for images that already exist and designing a new image based on those results. Because they don’t show their working it is unclear exactly how they came to their results.

They found that nearly 40 percent of the images showing ‘perfect’ women were blonde, 30 percent had brown eyes, and over half had olive skin.

For male, it showed 70 percent of the ‘perfect’ men had brown hair and 23 percent had brown eyes.

Similar to women, the vast majority of men were olive-skinned and nearly half had facial hair.