Austin Photographer Picked Up a Beauty Magazine. She Looked for the Credits and Found Something Unsettling: ‘It’s Not Real’

AI is so pervasive—from the content people consume to the accounts that they interact with online. Anything can be AI-generated. When Cassandra Klepac (@cassandra.klepac), a photographer from Austin, picked up a magazine at the airport, it didn’t strike her off as strange until she noticed a missing detail in the photos.

Klepac found a magazine by the Beauty Authority and decided to skim through it. She commented that it contained “really great photos” of women. As a photographer, she instinctively started looking for credits.

“Photo credit is an AI prompt,” she told Instagram. The photographer saw the prompts used to create the images.

“It’s not real,” she alleged, disappointed at the publication for using AI-generated images for a beauty magazine about women. Even the supposed “dermatologist” depicted in the magazine was just an AI-prompted woman.

In the photo, the “dermatologist” was assessing another woman’s face and her face fillers.

“This article is about beauty procedures. So, why are we using fake women to talk about real women’s bodies? Why are we using AI-generated faces for this?” Klepac pointed out. She seemed particularly disturbed about the prompts that said “emphasizing elegant proportions” of the AI photo.

Taking advice from generated faces

“What is this doing for anyone? Do you trust this information when paired with a fake face?” She asked, and it’s particularly ironic that the magazine is called the Beauty Authority.

“As a photographer that has photographed so many real people, mostly women—women who don’t feel like they’re not photogenic—I love being able to get the trust of someone and being able to take a photograph that they really love, that they feel great in,” Klepac explained. Photography doesn’t simply capture photos but also the reality of the subject. It’s up to the photographer to make the person feel comfortable in their skin.

“This is about removing real people from stories that are about them,” Klepac said. The photographer doesn’t feel comfortable with the use of AI-generated women in a magazine that talks about real-life beauty procedures and women’s bodies. Despite her professional occupation, Klepac was far more offended that the publication used generated women—pixels who’ve never experienced the supposedly real stories in the magazine the way real women have.

“It says here in the article, ‘Confidence is a feeling.’ Confidence is not an AI-generated image that says, ’emphasizing elegant proportions,’ and writes, ‘full body of a confident woman in her 30s wearing a sleek, white bathing suit.’ That’s not confidence,” Klepac argued. She even questioned herself—whether or not she was overthinking the scenario.

AI undermining credibility

But commenters on Instagram were just as disturbed by Klepac’s magazine discovery.

A social media user on Instagram wrote, “The articles were probably AI-generated as well.” Other commenters on TikTok under Klepac’s reposted video agreed that with the use of these images, the magazine may not be trustworthy.

Others have also shared their experiences as a creative pushing back against AI in the industry. One wrote, “I begged my corporate marketing team not to use AI for dermatology and plastic surgery imagery. I was the only one who was opposed. I was fired shortly after.”

Another said, “As a photographer, all I can say is thank you to anyone and everyone who enjoyed our skill, talent, and work while you could. We tried, we really did, but damn, we are so screwed.”

Another comment reads, “And we thought Photoshop was bad.” Filters can distort people’s self-perception. But using AI-generated faces would elevate the expectation to an impossible standard.

Opting to use AI-generated faces would bloat the expectation to an impossible standard. If the faces in the magazine aren’t human, what authority does the publication have to speak on beauty and real women? They might as well be writing for bots.

(featured images: Cassandra Klepac)

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