Abstract:

From agrarian to industrial societies, technologies such as painting, sculpture, and photography could represent the human face but not control it. In the emerging intelligent digital society, driven primarily by platforms and traffic economies, digital technologies have realized comprehensive control over the face. This kind of control leverages two fundamental human impulses: the desire for beauty and the pursuit of profit. A digital platform’s “one-click generation” of beauty immediately satisfies people desire for digital beauty. However, digital capital compels individuals to use digitally enhanced faces to attract social attention, gain traffic, and generate benefits. In a digital society, machines have given us “beautiful faces”, while also giving us “beautiful traps”. Excessive beautification and deepfakes are weakening the recognizability of the human face and the ability of humans to obtain real experiences based on other humans’ faces. Meanwhile, illegal AI face-swapping technologies undermine not only the authenticity of society but also disrupt the foundations of trust and credibility, bringing various social problems. To build a benevolent intelligent digital society, it is imperative to deeply explore this new “technology-society” phenomenon of digital technology’s control over the face, and more importantly, to scientifically prevent and solve the social impact it causes.

Key words: artificial Intelligence, facial control, deepfake, AI face-swapping, digital beautification