Best Of: Jia Tolentino on plastic surgery & AI / ‘Beef’ creator Lee Sun Jin

Gia Tolentino discusses how social media and AI have dramatically reshaped beauty ideals in America. She explains that the 'Instagram Face,' a popular aesthetic among influencers featuring plumped lips, lifted cheeks, and large eyes, has become a standard modeled and amplified by algorithms and digital filters. This aesthetic has trickled down to the general population, leading to increased cosmetic procedures among young people. Tolentino emphasizes that as faces are optimized and surgically refined to appear 'natural,' they actually become less expressive of individual human identity, turning faces into products rather than windows to the soul. She warns about how this shift is aligning with the age of AI, which favors homogenized, idealized images over authentic human imperfections, ultimately eroding our connection to reality.

The conversation expands into how identity and power are expressed through appearance. Tolentino describes trends like the 'Mar-Lago face,' a term for overly artificial, youthful-looking faces associated with political figures, illustrating the political implications of beauty and gender presentation. She also critiques how some political and social groups promote an exaggerated femininity or masculinity through surgical or aesthetic means, which paradoxically can serve as a form of drag or performance of gender roles. The discussion touches on the societal pressures that keep beauty standards ever-changing and highly disciplinary, especially for women, fostering a culture where perfection is incessantly pursued. Tolentino highlights the influence of surveillance technologies and AI in perpetuating these standards, making human imperfection seem inferior.

Tolentino shares her personal struggles with the desire to conform to beauty standards and her efforts to resist them, especially in raising her children. She talks about her approach to encouraging her daughter to value her natural uniqueness and to resist societal pressures that equate worth with appearance. The conversation reflects on how societal motives for beauty are often rooted in compliance and obedience, and how individuals—particularly women—are caught between authentic self-expression and conforming to external expectations. Tolentino advocates for recognizing the value of imperfection as fundamentally human, and she discusses her efforts to model this attitude for her children.

A major theme is the impact of AI and digital technology on human perception and identity. Tolentino notes that AI-generated images tend to favor a narrow, homogenized view of 'normal' women—white, young, and beautiful—highlighting concerns about how AI amplifies and entrenches unrealistic beauty standards. She argues that AI’s programming often devalues human imperfection, which is essential to our humanity. The conversation underscores how the growing use of AI in image synthesis and cosmetic procedures may further detach our sense of reality from our authentic selves, making human faces and identities less recognizable and more commodified.