Type “a woman” into an AI image generator, you get the same type of face, shape, proportions. Every time.
I’ve been sitting with this for a while now.
We spent decades in advertising fighting against only representing exactly this look. That was real, hard won work, to get actual bodies and actual faces and actual range into the pictures we put out. And AI arrived and quietly handed it all back to us, dressed up as the default.
Nobody’s calling it backsliding. It doesn’t look wrong. It looks like a stock photo always looked, before we deliberately changed things.
Here’s what I think is actually going on. A casting director used to make that call, on set, by hand, every time. A stylist too. You couldn’t skip the decision even if you wanted to, someone had to choose who was standing in front of the lens. There was sign-off, strategy, real thought.
AI took that friction away.
What can we absolutely not afford AI to decide for us?
So now the question isn’t can AI make a beautiful picture of a woman? It already can. The question is: what can we absolutely not afford AI to decide for us? What human approach should we be intentional to keep?
That’s the tension for us as designers. We have to become so good at “what makes us human” that we’re deliberate and intentional about the absolute detail we never had to think about, because a human was taking the photo, designing the artwork. Nope, now we need to become exceptionally great at, you guessed it - being human, and what makes us so.
This is the new kind of fight.
