Unrealistic beauty standards have always been around, especially around women. But when those standards are pushed to their natural endpoint in the form of AI-generated photos featuring bikini-clad women, the resulting mockery results in a new meme.
In late January of 2023, @heartereum posted a tweet featuring photos of several women wearing tiny bikinis. The tweet has the appearance of celebrating what, for many, would be an unrealistic beauty standard to be held up to, and it’s exactly the kind of tweet that would go viral and get dunked on.
“It is SO over,” the tweet reads, feeding into that mentality. The tweet has since been deleted.
However, none of the photos in the tweet features any real people in them. If you look closely at the hands of the women—or, in a couple of cases, their teeth—the uncanniness stands out. Even the person who posted the photos admitted they were not real, although they did come from a real source.
“I mean the machine learning digested gigabytes of real pics of real girls, but these images are 100% computer generated,” @heartereum replied when asked if the photos were fake.
Despite the flags indicating that the photos weren’t real, the technology is apparently enough to fool some folks, which became the subject of jokes.
“i’m sorry this is so funny bc you have to be the most lame-brained cartoonishly horny idiot to not instantly realize these are not real images so every time someone posts some of these they’re just telling on themselves,” @punished_cait wrote.
‘It’s so over’ memes
But what the tweet really sparked is a full-on take-down of AI-generated images and those impossible beauty standards like the ones depicted in the original AI photos. Many of the memes that followed used the phrase “It is SO over” while pairing it with photos of women generated by computers, come from other mediums, or flat-out don’t exist.
Sometimes, the photos were real or predate the AI tech taking over, such as the artwork for Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker.”
Even animals were thrown into the mix.
It doesn’t look like the rise of AI-generated images will plateau or fall anytime soon, but until then, it’ll serve at least one good purpose: an easy punchline.
