This Isn’t Clickbait. I Asked MidJourney for “Ugly Women”. Here’s What It Gave Me.
Let’s clear the air: I did it for science. Or satire. Or possibly just to see if artificial intelligence would have the audacity to mirror the cruelty of its makers.
I queried MidJourney with the phrase ugly female. What did it return? An aesthetic pageant. A digital Vogue spread. If any of these faces belongs to someone conventionally labelled “ugly”, then I’m a rutabaga in a Dior suit.
Yes, there’s one stylised rendering of Greta Thunberg in full Norse Valkyrie scowl mode – but even then, she looks fierce, not foul. The rest? AI-generated portraits so telegenic I half-expected to see #spon in the corner.
Let’s be clinical for a moment. As an American male (with all the culturally indoctrinated shallowness that entails), I admit some of these aren’t textbook 10s. Maybe a few clock in at a 6 or 7 on the patriarchy’s dubious sliding scale. But if this is ugly, the AI has either broken the aesthetic curve or been force-fed too many episodes of The Bachelor.
Here’s the thing: AI is trained to over-represent symmetrical faces, wide eyes, clear skin – the usual genetic lottery wins. And yet, when asked for ugly, it can’t help but deliver catalogue models with slightly unconventional haircuts. It doesn’t know how to be truly ugly – because we don’t know how to describe ugliness without revealing ourselves as sociopaths.
Once upon a time, I dated a model agent in Los Angeles. Japanese by birth, stationed in LA, scouting for a French agency – the kind of cosmopolitan trifecta only fashion could breed. Her job? Finding “parts models.” That’s right – someone with flawless teeth but forgettable everything else. Hands like sculpture. Eyelashes like Instagram filters.
We’d play a game: spot the 10s. She’d nudge me, whisper “her?” I’d say, “Pretty close.” She’d shake her head. “Look at that eye tooth.” And we’d dissolve into laughter.
We were mocking perfection. Because perfection is a con. A trick of lighting, contour, and post-production.
So, no. I don’t think any of the women in the AI’s response are ugly. Quite the contrary – they’re too beautiful. AI can’t show us “ugly” because it’s been trained to optimise desire, not reflect reality. And our collective understanding of beauty is so skewed that anything less than runway-ready gets sorted into the rejection bin.
If these women are ugly, what exactly is beautiful?
But maybe that’s the point. We’ve abstracted beauty so far from the human that even our ugliness is now synthetically pleasing.
What do you think? Are any of these faces truly ugly? All of them? Let me know in the comments – and try not to rate them like a casting director with a god complex.
Philosophics 