This shock was due to my brief but intense encounter with Facetune, that app that promises we can all look like the perfect people who don't actually exist. You know the ones — those mysterious beings on Instagram where you're never quite sure whether they were born in Tel Aviv, Tokyo, or rather in a data center.
The story of Facetune is as bizarre as it is characteristic of our times: Developed in 2013 by an Israeli company, the app was originally meant to simply help touch up selfies a bit. You know — remove a pimple here, adjust lighting there. Harmless, really.
But then artificial intelligence entered the picture, and suddenly the digital makeup kit became a kind of facial transformer. The latest version of the app promises we can all look like AI-generated supermodels. In real-time! During a video call! What was once reserved for Hollywood and its special effects can now be done by any teenager on their smartphone.
Don't get me wrong — I'm not a tech pessimist. But when an app promises it can edit my face to look like an AI-generated face, which in turn is based on the edited faces of real people … well, it makes me a bit dizzy.
It gets particularly interesting when you consider that we now live in a world where people optimize their faces based on role models that don't even exist. AI generates flawless faces, people try to achieve this standard, and the AI learns again from these edited images. A perfect cycle of artificiality.
The result? A generation that feels uncomfortable when they just look … normal. "Filter dysmorphia" is what experts call the phenomenon when people can no longer bear their unfiltered mirror image. Yet it's precisely the imperfect that makes us human. Our little quirks, the laugh lines, the mischievous asymmetry of a genuine smile.
Maybe we should develop a new app. One that re-humanizes our filtered faces. That artificially adds a few wrinkles, makes the skin appear less porcelain-smooth, makes the eyes a little less perfect. We could call it "RealMe." Or better yet: just put the smartphone aside and look in a real mirror.