On: ‘Make this face look gay’: AI models alter faces to give people stereotypical...

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.