When AI Makes Everyone Look the Same

AI tells us it’s “enhancing” beauty. But what happens when every enhancement looks the same?

https://youtube.com/shorts/mbXBJQyLEZY?si=s-C1mTxFvN56GFSL

“Our diverse bodies and faces are being compressed into a single look.” Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits confronts the digital flattening of beauty and individuality.

In her Facetune Portraits series, Gretchen Andrew confronts a growing phenomenon: the homogenization of beauty through algorithmic design. Her process begins with portraits of diverse women — Miss Nigeria, Miss Denmark, Miss Philippines — and subjects them to AI tools that promise perfection. The results are hauntingly uniform.

The AI’s idea of “improvement” erases cultural and physical diversity, replacing it with a standardized, Westernized template. The message is subtle but clear: difference is noise; perfection is conformity.

Through painterly interventions and deliberate digital contradiction, Gretchen turns this quiet violence into a visual protest. The work insists that beauty cannot be compressed into a single data-driven form — that our humanity exists in the variance the algorithm tries to remove.