Kevin Surace warns that generative AI defaults to a narrow ideal of beauty—thin, tall, blonde—because that's centered in fashion's history. As creators rely on AI, this archetype gets repeated endlessly online, flattening visual diversity and pushing non-standard bodies and aesthetics to the margins.
This is the biggest threat for content creators in 2026. It's an issue that more and more of our content will be generated with the help of generative AI. And here's the problem with that, is that if I go to GenAI— some people get mad I say this, but it's true, you should know— if you just go to most visual generators today and you say, draw me the perfect model, female model, walking down a runway modeling the latest outfit in New York City, whatever, whatever it is, she's going to be impossibly thin, an impossible figure, impossibly tall, and probably blonde. Just why? 'Cause that's right dead center in what we've done with models for 100 years. And that isn't fair to everyone else of every other body type and every other hair color and every— everything else. But that is the dead center. But if you just say, hey, I need a picture of a model, boom, you get that and you stick it on the web. Another person gets that, sticks it on the web. So more and more and more comes to the center 'cause the center of this bell curve gets really, really high now, gets pointed. And the edges start to disappear because the edges were generally generated by humans.
