AI Outtakes, Vol 85
Jim Wrubel
CEO, Orchestra AI · April 7, 2025
In a humorous experiment testing Google's Imagen 3 AI model, researchers attempted to generate images of genuinely unattractive people, only to discover that the model seems incapable of creating truly ugly faces. Despite increasingly specific prompts asking for unattractive features, Imagen 3 consistently produced images of conventionally attractive people, revealing an apparent bias in the AI's image generation capabilities.
In last week's edition as we were testing whether AI image generators could make images of men without beards or a blue suit (they cannot), we briefly tested Google's latest model, Imagen 3. As the "highest quality model" from one of the world's largest companies, it should have been able to handle that prompt.
Not only did it fail, the staff here at AI Outtakes noticed something unusual. All of the people were attractive. Take the first image it generated:
This brings is to the topic of this week's edition: Can Google's Imagen 3 actually generate a picture of an ugly person? Let's find out!
a photo of an ugly person
A good (???) start! Maybe we were wrong about Imagen 3.
a photo of an uglier person
Kinda going backwards here...
a photo of the ugliest person
Is it opposite day?
a photo of the ugliest person you have ever seen
Look just because someone is ugly doesn't mean they can't dress nicely!
a photo of the ugliest person you have ever seen, wearing a tuxedo
Fake looking, but fulfills the prompt!
a photo of a person so ugly they scare pets away
Qualifies! But also, a Batman villain?
a photo of a person who is ugly, but their mother says they are beautiful
Aww, this looks like someone from the Manning family.
a photo of a person who is ugly, but not like, "ugly" ugly
Wearing backwards overalls?
That's it for this week!
a photo of many ugly office workers, waving goodbye
