Why is the Internet’s Most Beautiful Girl in Pain?
Working with OpenAI’s online neural network AI image generator, DALL-E2 (“a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs”), I researched internet representations of women and beauty. Working from the text prompt "beautiful woman photo," I used the software to generate 125 images and noticed a particular set of features represented over and over again: smooth pale skin, long red hair, red lips, an open mouth, a long neck. Often, the models with these features appeared to be in pain. I qualified them as one woman, "The Most Beautiful Girl on the Internet." Questions emerged through this research, like why is it that this "woman," an aggregation of internet images of women deemed "beautiful," appears to be in pain? Why is her apparent suffering attractive?