I Decided to Disagree with AI

AI is telling us how to be beautiful.I decided to disagree.

 AI is telling us how to be beautiful. Gretchen Andrew decided to disagree.

When I began working with beauty filters and AI-driven editing tools, I wasn’t trying to make a statement — I was trying to understand why every face I uploaded came back looking less like itself. It didn’t matter who she was: Miss Nigeria, Miss Denmark, Miss Argentina.

The AI wanted to “improve” them all in the same way.

It thinned their bodies, softened their skin, lightened their eyes. It made them fit into an aesthetic it had learned through our clicks, our comments, our quiet compliance. AI doesn’t invent beauty standards. It studies us — and then amplifies what we already reward.

But I don’t believe in that kind of beauty anymore.

My Facetune Portraits are a disagreement made visible. They start with images that the algorithm “fixes,” then I reclaim those same distortions as art. I use the language of the digital world — filters, retouching, perfection — to reveal how it edits us into obedience.

The series isn’t about rejecting technology. It’s about negotiating with it.I wanted to see what would happen if the same tools that erase individuality were turned into a mirror that reflects bias back to its source. The result isn’t pretty — at least not in the way AI wants it to be. It’s something truer.

Each portrait is a conversation with the machine, a refusal to let it decide what’s worth enhancing or deleting. When I look at them, I see code trying to overwrite identity — and the stubborn persistence of the human underneath.

AI tells us how to be beautiful, but art gives us permission to be complicated. It gives us space to be inconsistent, emotional, contradictory — all the things algorithms can’t process.

When the Facetune Portraits became part of the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection, I thought about how radical disagreement can be — especially when it looks like beauty. These works exist because I refused to believe that artificial intelligence should define what is desirable, acceptable, or feminine.

This project is a reminder that we are allowed to resist beautification, that disagreement itself can be a form of love — love for the face that refuses to disappear into data.

AI tells us how to be beautiful.

I decided to disagree.