I'm Worried About ChatGPT Glow-Ups
On the parts of ourselves we shouldn't outsource
If you, like me, are an unemployed millennial woman who likes makeup and spends upwards of four hours a day on TikTok, you also might have recently reached the “ChatGPT helped me glow up” side of the app. And if you, like me, took years of emotional excavation and experimental haircuts to glow up on your own, you might also feel a little upset by this.
The Washington Post recently covered this phenomenon, but if you don’t wanna read all that, here’s a recap—there’s a bunch of young women on ChatGPT uploading photos of themselves to the AI assistant and telling it to make them hot(ter). They’re asking it to act as “an elite personal stylist,” for example, and “objectively” analyze their face shape, read their seasonal colors, determine their best hair length, and suggest where they might want to try some filler (for “optimal facial balance”—optional).
And the women are happily obliging. They’re cutting their hair, buying brand new makeup, and booking expensive microneedling appointments. I even saw one girl who started a supplement regimen based solely on the computer’s recommendations. (Please consult your doctor!!!)
There’s a lot to be bothered by here—the willing handover of our faces to our tech overlords who will eventually make AI porn out of us or the significant amount of water people keep telling me ChatGPT uses to function…
Those are bad, I guess—though I’d rather blame Sam Altman for that stuff than a Marketing Coordinator in Ohio who wants to know if she should get bangs—but I’m most concerned by the part of the glow-ups we can’t see: what’s lost when we keep trying to outsource our self-construction.
Not to be Grandpa Simpson shaking my cane at the clouds, but back in my day (the late ‘90s), your ugly, awkward years were…ugly and awkward. There was little hope for the clunky and inept among us. Drugstore makeup was chalky and we straightened our hair with an iron. And it wasn’t until my 20s when I encountered a body glitter for the first time in the wild.
And before that, pre-internet, it was even harder to look like the person you wanted to be. As young teens, we searched high and low for specialty items that spoke to us. We had to put in real miles—at the mall, at thrift stores, thumbing through magazines and catalogs, all to find the specific accouterment that would represent who we were.
For me, one of those accouterment was a pair of shoes.
I’d never seen anything like them. They were wild. Big, loud and silver. I was convinced they were the lynchpin missing from my life, the key that would unlock sudden popularity and universal adoration.
They were gorgeous and unique, so of course my mom didn’t get them. My dad didn’t either. They both routinely referred to them as “hideous” and “clodhoppers.”
It didn’t matter, though. I loved them.
While writing this piece, thinking back on them fondly, I wondered if I could find them.
I did, on eBay. And—
My mom’s never been more right.
I mean, Jesus Christ. What’s even going on here?
They’re giving IT does acid with the crew from Medieval Times. They’re giving they found him at the bottom of the East River with these things strapped to his feet. They’re giving “I am a bridge troll, small and clever/Answer my riddle or enter never.”
But they meant so much to me. Not only did no one else in my school have them (for good reason, I can see now…) but I sourced them myself. I found them in the back of a delia*s catalog, bought them with my own money, and had to fill out an IRL order form to get them. Which makes cringing at them that much sweeter.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I think young women should have to suffer because I did—I’m not a boomer. And of course I understand the need to look good, I’m a woman who’s been alive for more than five seconds. It’s more that, as women, I want us to keep as many unnecessary shoulds out of our lives as possible.
Womanhood is tornado of shoulds that only get louder and harder to solve as you get older.
Should you take that job? Meet up with that guy? Start wearing bronzer?
Move across the country, get a red light mask, go the therapy?
Stop therapy, lose 15 pounds, fix your screen time?
Should you have a kid, stop the medicine, go high protein?
You should really work on those 15 pounds—
We don’t need any more shoulds, especially if they come from robots in fake lab coats. Bedsides, the AI isn’t even telling us what’s beautiful—it’s regurgitating everything it’s ever seen online. It’s pulling a statistical average. There’s a chance your eyebrows are totally fine.
Self-expression is the project of a lifetime. It’s hard and tiresome. It takes trial and error, risk and failure, and really ugly shoes. But it’s also deeply rewarding, continuously having to find yourself, somewhere amongst the experiments.
Despite the frustration, though, sometimes it’s even fun. Or at least—if you’ll give me one more—it should be.
It seems like it’s one of the only parts that’s up to us. Let’s try to hold on to the parts we get to choose.
I will never recover from the shoe reveal
CC would have loved this!!!!!