Universal Beauty, Facetune, and the Homogenizing Power of AI

AI is often positioned as a tool of infinite creativity, a system capable of generating new visual worlds and expanding artistic possibility. Many of the Lumen Prize nominees exemplify that optimism, showcasing AI as a generative partner in the production of groundbreaking digital works.

A deeper look at how Universal Beauty, Facetune, Portraits, Nigeria challenges the myth of AI as a purely creative force — revealing how it shapes sameness across bodies, identities, and cultures.

But my daily experience with AI told a very different story — one defined not by expansion, but by compression. Instead of opening up space for new forms of individuality, AI-driven tools were subtly making everything feel more standardized, more uniform, more the same.

Universal Beauty, Facetune, Portraits, Nigeria was created to make that tension visible.

Facetune is an ideal lens through which to examine this phenomenon. It’s an everyday app, not an avant-garde technology, yet it wields enormous cultural power. Instead of diversifying aesthetic possibilities, it narrows them. It smooths, reshapes, and perfects faces toward a single, algorithmically sanctioned ideal. Across different cultures — including in Nigeria — these digital beauty standards increasingly mirror each other, suggesting that AI is becoming a universalizing force that overrides local aesthetics and lived individuality.

By translating these Facetune-edited images into paintings, the series reintroduces materiality into a space dominated by digital polish. Through the slowness of paint, the cracks in the algorithmic ideal become visible again. And in doing so, the work highlights a critical truth: AI doesn’t just generate images; it generates norms.

This homogenizing tendency stretches beyond beauty. The same forces are now shaping emails, project proposals, interior design, recipes, branding, even the tone of our conversations. AI is rapidly standardizing the visual and verbal languages we use to navigate the world.

This series encourages us to rethink AI not only in terms of what it can create, but also what it quietly makes inevitable. It asks us to question how much individuality we are willing to trade for algorithmic efficiency — and what gets lost when creativity becomes synonymous with conformity.