No, just internet in general. There are a lot of sites/services that put the stereotypical "hot" women in the light and don't even consider anything else. The same way text content is driven by the most vocal people, video are cut/tailored towards hyperactive squirrels, etc.

AI just averages all this out and asks you "do you want it tipped a bit this way or that way". (I know it's a gross overgeneralization, but it still stands)

Curating the internet as a "sane, balanced" data source raise two main issues : what does "sane / balanced" mean, and how much human power is needed to seep through all the garbage. This is the main reason I'm not too worried about "AI". We will bend the thing to be a useful tool for a lot of usecases by using local training, but unless these two questions gets an appreciable upgrade, having one big "ubiquitous" AI model that will answer every need is not on the horizon.

Decades before the internet we knew that popular media does not depict actual women and tends to advance distorted ideals of beauty, often converging toward just one.

Lol totally! I started with subtle wrinkles around here eyes and gradually tuned it up to unattractive, old, ugly, sad, which is what you see in the pic I posted 🤣

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness

It just happens when you average faces.

The notion of progress is too much of a catch-all positivity word here. If speed and efficiency is all we care about then, sure, ai will blow traditional artists out of the water. If however, we care about what the artist themselves brings in terms of their unique perspective, talents, and stories, ai art will only serve to muffle and homogenize that.

The notion of people with disabilities being able to use it to create something is a fair point. I think it'd be absurd to say that it's only negatives. However, these kinds of cases, as good as they are, are often used to patch over the uglier aspects of what ai generated images is doing and will do. Kind of like how in Florida they're talking about slavery teaching people valuable skills.

I think the people most excited about it are those who seem to have a resentment of artists at some level, likely because those artists are already doing what they wish they could do. That's why I think there's almost a perverse giddiness at the notion of crushing artist's jobs and replacing them with these tech-oriented ones.

It seems like for some people, the ideal society is one in which humans have been made irrelevant and machines interface with each other in perpetuity, generating a heap of content that no one ever sees or thinks about. It's the kind of sci-fi dystopian ending which we don't want to acknowledge because there's money to be made for someone and nothing is supposed to get in the way of that.

And that's totally fine. I could see using it for that purpose too. I think there are a fair number of people who might like to be artists, but they think it's too hard, and so they look at ai as being a shortcut.