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

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.