My doctoral research examines how generative artificial intelligence (AI) influences self-image and self-evaluation for people living with symptoms of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD).
Defined by an intense preoccupation with ‘inconsequential’ or ‘non-existent’ aesthetic flaws, BDD often manifests through routines of mirror-checking, skin-picking and relentless comparison. As a disorder only recently gaining medical recognition, knowledge of BDD remains nascent. Yet, while clinical understandings are beginning to unfold, our social and digital milieu is changing apace.
Since the early 2020s, AI-powered “rating” apps, beauty filters and automated retouching tools have become increasingly commonplace. Their ubiquity signals a wider cultural turn: a growing reliance on generative AI as an “objective” resource that edits, enhances and reassembles bodies. For many users, AI’s supposed ‘impartiality’ makes it a trusted mirror, yet what it reflects is far from neutral. Trained on datasets that fail to adequately represent diversity, these systems reproduce narrow ideals, privileging thinness and unblemished skin. Thus, for many users, these tools amplify anxiety, hardening insecurities into datafied ‘truths’. Against this backdrop, one must question what it means to live with dysmorphia when the ‘self’ is continually refracted through algorithmic portrayals of beauty.
