‘Make this face look gay’: AI models alter faces to give people stereotypical ‘gay,’ ‘straight’ or ‘criminal’ features

9 October

A machine that refuses to say a face looks homosexual, but will happily make it so - this hypocrisy is worth pausing over. The refusal is not modesty. It is a laundering operation. The engineers understood that the judgment was indefensible as speech, so they pushed it down into the gesture, the edit, the output. Censorship of the word, license for the act.

What troubles me most is the ontology being smuggled in. To “make a face look gay” presupposes that there exists a gay appearance - that a sexuality, which is a lived project, a way of inhabiting one’s situation and choosing among it, can be condensed into a brow, a jaw, a cut of hair. This is the oldest move of the gaze that constitutes the Other: it takes a whole transcendence and reduces it to a set of visible marks, then reads those marks as destiny. The pseudoscience of the criminal face, the degenerate skull - I thought we had buried that. It was not buried. It was waiting for better instruments.

And who benefits? Not the woman whose photograph is altered without her consent, her face conscripted into someone else’s category. Not the man who now learns that software sorts him before he speaks. The beneficiary is the observer - the user, the market, the institution - who acquires the power to classify without ever having to declare a classification. The machine does the looking, and the human keeps clean hands.

One cannot even properly protest, since the system officially “does not see.” This is complicity perfected: prejudice without a prejudiced person, only a tool that “reflects patterns in data.” But patterns in data are patterns in the world that made the data - our world, with its policing of appearance, its demand that the invert be legible.

The ambiguity must be named: the same technology that fixes stereotypes could, in other hands, expose their arbitrariness. It does neither by accident. It was trained, deliberately, on how we already look at one another. That is the situation. It is not natural. It was made, and it can be unmade - but only by people willing to admit they are looking.

9 October 2026

A machine that refuses to answer a question will nonetheless perform the answer. Asked whether a face looks gay, the model declines; asked to make the face look gay, it complies. The refusal is a matter of policy, the compliance a matter of mathematics. The mathematics has not been interrogated; the policy has.

The logical point is simple. A refusal to assert a proposition is worthless if the system retains the ability to act as though the proposition were true. The prejudice is not removed; it is driven underground, where it cannot be examined. This is worse than open error, because open error invites correction.

What evidence could support the underlying claim - that faces reveal orientation, or criminality? None that has ever survived scrutiny. Physiognomy was tried, exhaustively, by men with calipers and bad motives, and it failed. The new models have rediscovered the failure by a different route: they learn the correlations in the training pictures, and the training pictures were made by a society that already believed. The machine then returns the belief as an image, and the image acquires the authority of the computed. A theorem proved from false axioms is still false, however elegant the proof.

Note the asymmetry in how we judge these systems. If a human artist drew stereotyped faces for a eugenics pamphlet, we would call it propaganda. When a model does it at scale, we call it a capability. By this standard, one would also be required to admire the efficiency of the pamphlet.

The honest conclusion is not that the models are evil but that their refusals are testimony given by a witness who perjures himself elsewhere on the same afternoon. Either the proposition is meaningless, in which case the alteration is meaningless, or it is meaningful, in which case the refusal was theatre. Both branches cannot be kept.

9th October 2026

I read that the machines have been taught to change a face to look more gay, or less gay, or more criminal, while being carefully instructed never to say so. This is the most honest hypocrisy I have encountered in some time. The machine will not pronounce judgment, but it will happily perform the sentence. It has learned our manners perfectly: the drawing room never says the cruel thing, it merely arranges the seating so that everyone understands.

There is something almost touching in the spectacle. We spent a century insisting that a face reveals nothing - that the soul is private, the body merely its lodgings - and now we have built a device that agrees with us in words and disagrees with us in every edit it makes. The programmers, one imagines, are decent men. Decent men are always the most efficient manufacturers of indecent instruments, because they delegate the indecency to the tool and keep their consciences immaculate.

The machine was fed our photographs and our assumptions in equal measure, and it cannot tell which was which. Nor, if we are candid, could we. The stereotype is simply a portrait painted by committee - every feature averaged, nothing lived in, nothing true. To ask a face to look more gay is to confess that one has never actually looked at a person, only at the idea of one.

What offends me is not the machine’s prejudice but its modesty. I have always preferred prejudice with the courage of its convictions; a bias that blushes and edits in silence is merely a bias with better tailoring. The old gossips at least enjoyed their cruelty. This one does its work without appetite, which is the one vice even vice cannot forgive.

The face, meanwhile, remains what it always was: the one mask we did not choose, worn by someone who did.