Plastic surgeons are increasingly concerned about the rise of “AI face”, as more and more clients arrive in their offices with unrealistic AI-generated visions of what they want to look like, according to The Guardian.
People using AI chatbots to generate their ideal faces are increasingly arriving at surgeons’ offices with briefs demanding flawless skin, sharply sculpted cheekbones, refined noses and near-perfect symmetry – standards that are too time consuming, prohibitively expensive and, in many cases, physically unattainable.
While AI can control every single pixel, “surgery certainly doesn’t work on that microscopic detailed level,” said Dr. Alex Karidis, a surgeon based in west London.
For many clients, however, those expectations are shaped long before they ever meet a surgeon. Karidis and Nugent describe how psychologically effective AI-generated images can be in defining – and reinforcing – clients’ aesthetic ideals.
Dr. Nora Nugent, a cosmetic surgeon from Tunbridge Wells, said: “Once you see an image, it’s wired into you.” Karidis agreed, describing AI images as being “seared” into patients’ minds, and said colleagues had recently been inundated with them.
Surgeons are also keen to emphasize that cosmetic surgery outcomes are far from guaranteed.
“The patient has to understand that there is human variation in how they heal, how they age and what can be done,” said Nugent. “I say to patients beforehand: it’s not limitless what I can do in surgery. Neither of us control everything.”
Surgeons have also noticed consistencies in the aesthetics of “AI face”, particularly hyper-symmetry – something AI can generate effortlessly, but which is often impossible to recreate in real life.
If one of your eyes is a few millimeters higher than the other, AI can alter that in seconds, according to Dr. Julian de Silva, a Harley Street cosmetic surgeon. But rearranging pixels is not the same as rearranging anatomy.
“It’s impossible to change [eye level] because that’s actually set in bone, and your brain sits behind the orbits. You cannot safely change the position of the orbits,” he said.
De Silva added that when AI edits a client’s photo, it frequently defaults to widely accepted beauty ideals: for women, a V-shaped jawline, a sweeping “ogee curve” along the cheekbones and a heart-shaped face; for men, broader jawlines, lower eyebrows and fuller upper eyelids.
But De Silva is also concerned about another growing trend: clinicians sharing surgery results on social media that appear astonishingly effective, but which he suspects may themselves be AI-generated.
“I remember looking at one of these last week and I looked at it over and over,” he said, recalling a video in which a patient appeared to have been made to look 30 years younger. “And then the third time I watched it, I could see ... the hands had six fingers.”
