What AI thinks a beautiful woman looks like

As AI-generated images spread across entertainment, marketing, social media and other industries that shape cultural norms, The Washington Post set out to understand how this technology defines one of society's most indelible standards: female beauty. Every image in this story shows something that doesn't exist in the physical world and was generated using one of three text-to-image artificial intelligence models: DALL-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. Using dozens of prompts on three of the leading image tools -- MidJourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion -- The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a "beautiful woman," all three tools generated thin women, without exception. Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging.