From À LA MODEST
I have two recent thoughts I’d like to share with you today regarding what it means to be beautiful and feminine. I want to preface this post by saying that I try to be as objective as possible, and my associations with people or companies do not represent my entire being. Just like with everyone else, I advise you to take my words with a grain of salt and feel free to discuss civilly if anything appears questionable.
AI Beauty Contest
On September 8, The Guardian sparked a little racial controversy, publishing a story about an artificial intelligence application called Beauty.AI that uses robots to judge humans’ Beauty. Basically, the robots picked mostly white women as winners and a small number of Asians. Only one “pick” appeared to be somewhat black. A similar story covering the AI beauty contest on Vice, a less known but widely accepted news source among the non-mainstream community, was published three days prior.
Beauty.AI prides itself on being the first venue holding an “international Beauty Contest Judged by artificial intelligence.” They launched early this year with plans to hold quarterly beauty contests. The AI beauty contest did not go viral until the second quarter with Beauty 2.0, however.
I actually have been getting updates from Beauty.AI through e-mail for months now, perhaps trying to get me to submit myself as a contestant due to their lack of non-white representation, which is the creators’ explanation for outputting biased results. That means I had known about the contest and the winners way before the news stories broke out. It feels surreal to see something go viral way after I learn about it, but that’s really the story of my life—from health information to the Alt-Right (made viral by Hillary’s fearmongering speech).
Below is my Twitter conversation with some Twitter friends the very same day Vice published their news story:
@thenewfem @zenfulscent Speaking of, I keep getting spammed by these guys: https://t.co/JolEkJVi10
— Rachel Dahl ❤ (@alamodest) September 5, 2016
@alamodest @zenfulscent Interesting that nearly all the winners are Caucasian or Asian. AI is notoriously racist.
— The New Femininity (@thenewfem) September 5, 2016
Since I still get direct updates from Beauty.AI, I also learned that they are postponing their Beauty 3.0 originally scheduled for October to improve their algorithms for judging beauty and to get a better sample of contestants. Here is part of the Beauty.AI team’s response to the controversy surrounding their robots’ “racial bias:”
“Our team is part of a collective of computer scientists and biologists religiously committed to extending human longevity and preserving humans in the youthful, healthy state for as long as possible. But surprisingly, many people care more about their looks than the age-related pathologies they develop and we decided to focus on appearance and beauty instead to get a mass market appeal and developed a platform, where human appearance could be evaluated using various techniques with frequent updates. This is how RYNKL and Beauty.AI were developed.”
Youth Laboratories is the company behind Beauty.AI and RYNKL, which is the company’s first AI app funded by Kickstarter. They are also the same guys behind Aging.AI, a healthcare project that is being used by my neighbors at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Dating.AI, a guide to falling in love with artificial intelligence.
Instead of looking at the results as “racist,” I see this as being an accurate view of almost every culture’s idea of beauty, fertility, and youth—all of which are overlapping characteristics that humans seek to not just survive through successful procreation but to thrive into the Singularity. I’m not saying that I prefer these results, I’m just surmising.
A controversial white preservation theory was made by Andrea Hardie stating that the white race will never die, because minorities will constantly evolve into “whiteness” through upwards migration. As much as this sounds reassuring to our white nationalists, I see it going in the other direction. I don’t need to look that far ahead into the future to see that many if not most interracial marriages involving a lighter skinned and a darker skinned parent puts out a beige baby. No offense to beigeness. I have Filipino roots after all, lest you forget that I simply cannot be biased.
I honestly don’t like to obsess about race like many others do because I primarily emphasize that we are spirit beings, but on the other hand, I also cannot ignore the misconceptions surrounding race which I do have a lot to say about. I also am vocal about beauty as it relates to health, which too often is ignored even by the most virtuous.
You can view Beauty.AI’s promo video below, and let me know your thoughts!
My “Red Pill” Story
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by one of my new favorite blogs, The New Femininity. The author behind this blog has also become a friend of mine, thanks to Twitter. In the interview, I cover a lot of things I’ve never before discussed to this extent on À LA MODEST. We talked about how I view femininity and beauty, apart from the mainstream Christian view.
Femininity within the modest fashion community looks more like wearing dresses and skirts all the time, which is not a bad personal decision to make. However, I don’t see Christ as someone policing a woman’s clothing and not talking to her because she isn’t wearing a dress or covering her knees. Too often the modesty niche where my blog mostly falls in is way too legalistic and condemning to a fault, without actually caring about other women who don’t fall in line with their standards. I talk about my personal thoughts on modesty in this interview as well.
Please have a look. Your feedback is appreciated! While you’re there, I’d love for you to look around the rest of the author’s blog. She has great insights on many things, including the so called “body positivity,” feminism, and other deadly poisons.
