In the Greek myth that would give future generations a word to describe the self-obsessed in our lives, Narcissus was a young man with a handsome face.
So beautiful, in fact, that the day he saw his reflection in a pond was the beginning of the end for poor Narc: he fell in love with his own face and languished beside the water, unable to look away.
Two centuries and changes later, social media users risk becoming the 2023 version of Narcissus, passed out above water, obsessed with what we see.
I’m talking about the wild intersection between social media, cosmetic surgery, and the (slightly terrifying) advancements in artificial intelligence that brought us ChatGPT. Now it has delivered a new, hyper-realistic filter to video-sharing site TikTok that threatens to turn all of its users into spectacularly boring mannequins.
Filters, for those whose idea of social media is a rotary phone and a spare half hour, are a popular video trick that can be used to overlay an online user’s face and give them, for example , smoother skin, cat ears, or just add a faux vintage look to modern snaps.
Filters have been around in various forms for over a decade. But there’s a newcomer to the neighborhood that has social media users, mental health professionals and, well, me, a little worried.
It’s TikTok’s so-called “bold glamour” filter and comparing it to the filters that came before it is like comparing the special effects of James Cameron’s Avatar movies to the special effects of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. (If you haven’t seen the latter, all you need to know is that Wood’s 1959 cult classic features UFOs hanging from ropes and a graveyard with cardboard headstones, with all the realism grainy that this entails).
This filter works by using AI to make your face look like you’ve gone to the plastic surgeon for a pinch, tuck, and to install a new set of cheekbones. What’s scary is how well it works, to the point that it can be hard to tell if you’re using a filter. . . unless you’re the person who has to look at yourself in the bathroom mirror every day and can confirm that you don’t look like Emily Ratajkowski in any way.
It doesn’t just work for stills but for videos, adjusting to your face via a complex algorithm that I couldn’t figure out if I had a copy of AI For Dummies, a year to read it and access the brain of Ada Lovelace from beyond the grave.
Fans gushed about how it makes them look like they’re wearing a face full of makeup, dabbled in Hollywood’s latest cosmetic obsession, mouth fat removal (if you don’t know, don’t ask), or were bitten with a month’s supply of Ozempic.
Above all, it makes users look like a more glamorous version of themselves (although an already photogenic colleague of mine insists it makes her look like Doris, the bartender from Shrek 2).
But what it really does is sand down the edges of a face, removing character and differences to make you a more beautiful version of yourself that’s also somehow less of yourself.
When I tried it I was captivated by the glamorous version of myself on my phone, like I was in one of those bad Netflix Christmas movies where someone finds out they have a long-lost secret twin. My skin was flawless, my slightly wobbly eye deflated. My lips channeled Angelina Jolie, or at least a Jolie wannabe with money to send a plastic surgeon’s kid to private school. When I removed the filter, my crow’s feet rushed like I was the bad guy at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
In some ways, this filter and its insane popularity – it’s been downloaded an estimated 18 million times in a matter of weeks – is the logical extension of a company that standardized Botox, fillers and moved much of the life, from dating to shopping, online.
But it has real-world consequences, given the scientific evidence that our brains and self-esteem are warped by time spent online. Not only do beauty filters tend to be racist, playing on Eurocentric characteristics, but experts say they’re bad for your mental health.
It’s not hard to understand that being surrounded by filtered faces will give us a distorted sense of normality. It’s even easier to understand that the more time we spend staring at an “embellished” version of ourselves, the more dissatisfied we’ll be when we tune out to face the reality of freckles, wrinkles, and a face that belongs only to us.
