AI models are increasingly appearing on social media and in advertising, but how can this affect body image?
Mia Perumal, who has recovered from an eating disorder, said she fears technology will make it even harder for young people to escape unrealistic beauty standards.
The 19-year-old Cardiff University student said she believed if she had access to AI during her eating disorder it would have had a “terrible impact”.
AI-generated videos and photos are also increasingly difficult to spot, she said.
This story contains information about eating disorders and self-harm.
When Mia Perumal was 12, she says she received harmful content through social media algorithms.
She now fears that the rise of AI models will amplify the damage on other young people.
Mia has noticed an increase in the number of beautiful, skinny, AI people on social media over the past year, with comments often coming from 12-year-old girls saying: “Dream body, ditch your workout routine, I want to look like that.”
She said she found it “really sad” because it’s completely impossible to get AI models. She believes the only option to prevent damage is to control the AI.
Mia Perumal says AI models and content should be controlled (Mia Perumal)
Mia said: “It’s all well and good to say ‘oh it’s AI, it’s not real’, but eating disorders don’t really listen to rationality.”
She wants young people “to be careful, to question everything”.
In the early 2000s, Kelly Watts, like most teenage girls, was worried about her appearance and said she was constantly comparing herself to people around her and to models in magazines, she said.
Now 41, she fears that her 11-year-old son will compare her body to fake photographs of “perfect people.”
As a marketing freelancer, AI in professional images is something Kelly sees everywhere, but often untagged, meaning it’s difficult to determine whether it’s real or fake.
“At first I didn’t know it was AI, but the more you see it, the more you can’t hide it. Now I see it pretty regularly,” Kelly said.
Her son Oscar loves playing rugby and is increasingly realizing that “some friends are bigger,” she says.
Although he hasn’t expressed concerns about his body, she worries that he might admire AI characters online.
Kelly Watts says she often compared herself to others growing up and it affected her self-confidence (Kelly Watts)
The 11-year-old watches YouTube and doesn’t yet have social media. But that doesn’t distance her from AI, which she says has infiltrated YouTube content.
Watching football players who have six-packs already has an influence on body image, she said, not to mention then being shown unrealistic AI-generated people.
“Especially with kids, you’ll wonder, ‘Will they ever get to that point?’
“It puts a lot of pressure on them, which they don’t need,” she said. “No one and nothing is perfect. I don’t want him to grow up thinking he has to be perfect.”
“I am his mother and the last person he will listen to rather than a big influencer,” she said, even if that influencer is AI.
Kelly said mastering AI is important and being able to tell real from fake is essential.
“At what point should we be aware that it can potentially be harmful to us and our children, and that AI should definitely be labeled more?
“Why do we want to compare ourselves to a robot rather than a human?”
Kelly worries her 11-year-old son could develop body image issues because of AI (Kelly)
“As human beings, we have this tendency to compare ourselves to others,” said Phillippa Diedrichs, professor of psychology at the Center for Appearance Research at UWE Bristol.
She said: “If we compare ourselves to very narrow beauty standards, which is usually the case, our beauty ideals are defined very narrowly, and that inevitably means that many of us will not meet those beauty ideals.
“This is especially the case with social media and digitally constructed images, because they don’t even exist in biological reality.
“We compare ourselves and when we fail, it can lead us to doubt ourselves and have a negative attitude towards our own appearance.”
She said that if AI was used to create more diversity and inclusion, then “when we compare ourselves, we feel the same and similar, which can have a neutral or positive impact on our well-being.”
Diedrichs said that unless designers trick the AI into showing realistic or diverse features, “it will give you an image that defaults to the average data set” of “narrow” traditional beauty standards.
“For example, people of color, gender, queer people, people with interesting and distinctive facial features, that means they’re going to be left out,” she said.
“You can try to overcompensate for that with how you incite and create these images. But if you don’t do that, you’ll get very generic images, which tend to reinforce a lot of biases that we have in society.”
She said this could create even more unrealistic beauty standards, “if not done carefully or thoughtfully, because it will default to the average of everything that has been learned.
How to spot AI models?
Diedrichs said there are “telltale” signs like “texture of the skin or eyes” and the appearance of “curly hair.”
She added that the absence of imperfections or pores can be a good way to identify AI, but it is constantly improving.
Some models have AI twins, as pictured here, which allow them to be “in two places at once”, says London-based model Alexsandrah Gondora (Getty Images)
Diedrichs said teenagers can be influenced, but they are also often “critical and conscious, and have more knowledge about technology than older people.”
“The thing is, we may be aware that these things are happening, but that doesn’t necessarily stop us from wanting to look like these images,” she said.
She said she recommends asking if the images or advertising “are helpful to you, does it make you feel good about yourself?” Does this inspire you, enlighten you?
“If it makes you feel deficient, that’s a very important signal to pay attention to, and it suggests that maybe it’s not my place to pay attention to.”
Diedrichs said AI models in advertising could allow small brands to have a large number of diverse models, or global brands to advertise in multiple markets.
“There could be diversity benefits,” she said.
However, she highlighted the “impact on the creative industries and the people working in that space. I would never like to see AI completely replace the artistry and creativity of humans.
“As a consumer, you also have a lot of power. You can express your views on this in the comments section,” she said. “The brands will see.”
Zoe Lee and Hannah Marriott, researchers at Cardiff Business School, said AI generation models and digital twins, virtual replicas of real-life models, are increasingly common.
Brands such as Balmain, Levi’s and H&M have experimented with the technology, they said.
But Lee and Marriott’s research found that consumers often reacted negatively to AI-generated models once they realized they weren’t real.
In focus groups, participants told them they “would rather have a real person and a lot fewer people represent us, but be real”, arguing that AI models could never reflect lived experience.
Marriott said it also found that people would “emotionally detach” from the images once they discovered they were generated by AI.
H&M said it worked with real-life models in 2025 to create “digital representations/twins of the models” that “themselves retained full control and ownership of their digital twin.”
However, this “exploration was suspended until spring 2025” to consider the next steps.
Balmain, Levi’s, TikTok, Meta and Google have been contacted for comment.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised, you can visit BBC action line to access help and support.
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