Artificial intelligence is conquering almost every aspect of our lives. Now, it has entered to the beauty industry. This past November took place the first beauty contest judged by robots.
Beauty is a concept that depends entirely on perception and perception is always biased. Besides, beauty is an ephemeral and unquantifiable notion. However, it has been demonstrated that healthy people look more attractive regardless of their nationality or age.
Although creating robots with the capacity of perceiving human attractiveness may be seen as a frivolous matter, scientists believe that this option will provide information about people’s health with just processing their photos. However, this is not the only goal; it is also desirable to find ways to slow down ageing and help people look healthier and more attractive.
Anastasia Georgievskaya, co-founder and research scientist at Youth Laboratories, the company behind Beauty.AI, said that “New tools like machine learning let us analyze images in a way that was never available to us before. For example, if the algorithms think you are much older than you actually are, you should consider changing your lifestyle”.
Now, how are these robots qualified to serve as judges in a beauty contest? Well, six different algorithms were used for this task. The first one scored people based on their wrinkles, the second one analyzed complexion and pimples, another studied symmetry, the following focused on the difference between perceived age and actual age, and the last one compared the contestants to models and actors with their same age and ethnic group.
In this contest participated more than 6,000 individuals from 119 different countries, being the most popular entry locations Russia, the U.S., India, Germany and Italy. Participants of all age ranges sent their selfies with no makeup, glasses or beard via iOS or Android to the Beauty.AI 2.0 app.
After the results were obtained, Alex Zhavoronkov, CSO of Youth Laboratories and CEO of Insilico Medicine, expressed that “There are many entrants that I personally find more attractive than the robots. But it seems like we have major individual bias in human opinion”. As well as the topic of whether or not machines can be creative, the AI’s opinions on human attractiveness has encountered opinions. Even though, Anastasia probably isn’t wrong when she told us that, “Everyone is a bit curious about what a robot thinks of them.”
Having had great success with the first installment, the plan is for these beauty contests to run every four months. For this, Beauty.AI isn’t just asking for selfie submissions, but also for developers to submit new algorithms to help with the beauty quantifying challenge.
More info: beauty.ai/
