Kylie Jenner Got Her Makeup Done by an AI Program for Dazed Beauty Magazine Cover

What kind of makeup would you end up with if a computer did it based off the artificial intelligence it gained looking through 17,000 of the most popular beauty and hair images on social media? Apparently something like Kylie Jenner’s in her Dazed Beauty editorial. AI program Beauty_GAN digitally applied hair and makeup to photographs of Jenner taken by Daniel Sannwald. Beauty_GAN is “first algorithm of its kind, trained to create its own beauty imagery based on what it sees on Instagram,” according to Dazed Beauty.

Daniel Sannwald x Beauty_GAN

In Dazed Beauty‘s article detailing how Beauty_GAN works, its creative director Sebastian Zimmerhackl explained why the images of Jenner aren’t exactly perfect despite the computer learning what “beauty” is according to the 17,000 photos it was fed. Its output, despite this, “doesn’t look perfect because it’s an experiment,” he said. “But maybe in the future, it is the artistic mistakes that we will remember.”

Daniel Sannwald x Beauty_GAN

Daniel Sannwald x Beauty_GAN

The outlet explained in its story that Jenner was photographed by Sannwald with almost no makeup to serve as a blank canvas for Beauty_GAN. And she was tapped because of her position as a trendsetter in the beauty industry. As Beauty_GAN’s art director Lukas Rudig put it, “It’s a collaboration: what the machine does to her is paint her face in the way it thinks it should be in a beauty selfie. To put it in a really easy metaphor, Beauty_GAN is like a mirror of popular culture, but the reflection staring back at you might not be what you expected. We teach a machine to see us and what it shows us back is not always what we see ourselves.”