Maybe different people have different ways of seeing. For example, most AI art kinda scares me and makes me close the tab as fast as I can. My reaction to plastic surgery is similar. Photos of Aella online have the obvious worked-on lips, when I see something like that in real life I want to walk out of the room. These are instinctive, immediate reactions. Judging from reddit, many people have the same reactions. But many don’t; maybe that set includes you. So folks like you will talk about “tasteful surgery”, and folks like me will keep being freaked out by each actual example we see.
As to your hypothesis about “part of the sales department”, this is a bit funny. You linked to a paper by Parsa et al. Have you tried googling Keon Parsa?
Women are using AI models to create “better” versions of their face and then asking plastic surgeons to make them look like that. So even if the surgery comes out exactly as intended, the effect is to make people look more like AI slop in real life. But apparently AI slop is like that because it’s what the modal person tends to upvote, so a lot of people won’t see any problem.
If the only thing you see about Aella is that she had work done on her lips, then I think that sufficiently well demonstrates the point that you don’t notice most “high quality” plastic surgery.
(Separately, even accepting for the sake of argument that you notice most work done and have a negative reaction to it, that is not very strong counterevidence to the original claim.)
I agree that one should be concerned about bad incentives in the cosmetic surgery outcomes research. Most of the “researchers” are surgeons. Outcomes research in medicine in general suffers from this problem. I am still comfortable with saying that cosmetic surgery outcomes research does provide net evidence for surgery results being good, even after correcting for conflict of interest concerns.
I’ll write a follow-up post focusing on this question (on my blog, not LW).
Maybe different people have different ways of seeing. For example, most AI art kinda scares me and makes me close the tab as fast as I can. My reaction to plastic surgery is similar. Photos of Aella online have the obvious worked-on lips, when I see something like that in real life I want to walk out of the room. These are instinctive, immediate reactions. Judging from reddit, many people have the same reactions. But many don’t; maybe that set includes you. So folks like you will talk about “tasteful surgery”, and folks like me will keep being freaked out by each actual example we see.
As to your hypothesis about “part of the sales department”, this is a bit funny. You linked to a paper by Parsa et al. Have you tried googling Keon Parsa?
Women are using AI models to create “better” versions of their face and then asking plastic surgeons to make them look like that. So even if the surgery comes out exactly as intended, the effect is to make people look more like AI slop in real life. But apparently AI slop is like that because it’s what the modal person tends to upvote, so a lot of people won’t see any problem.
If the only thing you see about Aella is that she had work done on her lips, then I think that sufficiently well demonstrates the point that you don’t notice most “high quality” plastic surgery.
(Separately, even accepting for the sake of argument that you notice most work done and have a negative reaction to it, that is not very strong counterevidence to the original claim.)
I agree that one should be concerned about bad incentives in the cosmetic surgery outcomes research. Most of the “researchers” are surgeons. Outcomes research in medicine in general suffers from this problem. I am still comfortable with saying that cosmetic surgery outcomes research does provide net evidence for surgery results being good, even after correcting for conflict of interest concerns.
I’ll write a follow-up post focusing on this question (on my blog, not LW).