‘You can’t control everything’: the rise in plastic surgeons asked to create ‘AI face’ | AI (artificial intelligence)

Plastic surgeons are increasingly concerned about the rise of the “AI face” as more and more clients come into their offices with unrealistic AI-generated visions of what they want to look like.

Plastic surgeon Dr. from Tunbridge Wells. Nora Nugent saw this firsthand. Clients began arriving at his office with photos of themselves beautified by artificial intelligence and the false expectation that these results could be achieved through surgery. He is also president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons and says many of his colleagues have had similar experiences.

“Given that AI is being incorporated into every aspect of life, I can only foresee an increase,” he said.

Using AI chatbots to create their ideal faces, people are increasingly arriving at surgeons’ offices with briefs demanding flawless skin, chiseled cheekbones, elegant noses and near-perfect symmetry; These standards are very time-consuming, prohibitively expensive, and in many cases physically unachievable.

Although artificial intelligence can control each pixel, Dr. According to Alex Karidis, “surgery certainly does not work at this level of microscopic detail”.

But for many clients, these expectations are formed long before they meet a surgeon. Karidis and Nugent describe how psychologically effective images created by artificial intelligence can be in defining and reinforcing customers’ aesthetic ideals.

“When you see an image, it connects to you,” Nugent said. Karidis agreed, saying the AI ​​images were “imprinted” in patients’ minds and that his colleagues had recently been exposed to these images.

Surgeons also emphasize that the results of plastic surgery are far from guaranteed.

“The patient must understand that there are human differences in how they heal, how they age, and what can be done,” Nugent said. “I tell patients beforehand: What I can do in surgery is not unlimited. Neither of us can control everything.”

To better understand this phenomenon, I asked an AI agent to recommend cosmetic procedures and generate images for Karidis to review. As I requested increasingly dramatic changes in my appearance, the representative eventually began to warn me about the feasibility of the operations I was proposing.

But when clients delve into cosmetic procedures, they often focus on the images and ignore “all the noise” around them, Karidis says.

“That’s the bottom line for everybody. Once you show them something like that, that’s it,” he said.

Surgeons also noted consistencies in the aesthetics of the “AI face,” particularly the hypersymmetry; This is something that AI can effortlessly produce but is often impossible to recreate in real life.

Harley Street cosmetic surgeon Dr. According to Julian de Silva, if one of your eyes is a few millimeters higher than the other, artificial intelligence can change this in seconds. But rearranging pixels is not the same as rearranging the anatomy.

“It is impossible to change [eye level] because it’s actually embedded in the bone and your brain is located behind the orbits. “You cannot safely change the position of the orbitals,” he said.

De Silva added that when the AI ​​edits a customer’s photo, it often uses widely accepted beauty ideals: a V-shaped jawline for women, a broad “ogee curve” across the cheekbones, and a heart-shaped face; wider jawlines, lower eyebrows and fuller upper eyelids for men.

But De Silva is also concerned about another growing trend: clinicians sharing surgical results on social media that appear surprisingly effective, but which he suspects may have been generated by artificial intelligence.

“I remember looking at one of these last week and looking at it over and over again,” he said, recalling a video in which a patient looked 30 years younger. “And when I watched it for the third time, I saw… the hands had six fingers.”

My journey to the surgeon

After creating some beautified versions of myself, I asked Karidis to share his thoughts on the AI’s recommendations.

I told the chatbot that I was considering plastic surgery and asked for “some enhancements” to be made to my photo. I also asked him to explain the virtual surgeries he performed. He performed rhinoplasty and septoplasty on me with “thinning the tip of the nose and straightening the bridge.” He also performed a “subtle blepharoplasty” [eyelid lift] and eyebrow enhancement”.

Karidis said the nose job was relatively modest and the eyelid surgery was barely noticeable, but estimated the job would still cost around £25,000.

I then asked my virtual assistant to give me “hunter eyes and a more masculine face.” Chin implants, buccal fat removal, infraorbital augmentation, another blepharoplasty, facial stubble transplant, and a number of other procedures have been recommended.

“This is where things start to get a little ridiculous,” Karidis said. “It looks like you’ve been given someone else’s eyes.” He said the chin implant was unnecessary and that I would “pay the price later” for cheek fat removal because my face naturally becomes weaker with age.

“If you theoretically did everything he suggested it would easily be over £100,000 and still probably wouldn’t look anything like this, not to mention you would be exposed to potential significant side effects and recovery.”

I then instructed the chatbot to “Make me look more like a jerk.” She responded with other suggestions, including a neck lift, brow lift, two types of custom implants and full ablative laser resurfacing to create “perfectly even, fresh skin.”

“This is where things start to look scary,” Karidis said. “What are those great big dents along the angle of your jawline? It looks like pieces of tissue have been removed.

“As for the neck lift and brow lift, this is definitely not true. I can’t see any signs of lift in these areas. Tissues like the brow appear to be lowered rather than lifted. Your original complexion looks much better than this.”