‘You can’t control everything’: the rise in plastic surgeons asked to create ‘AI face’ | AI (artificial intelligence)
Publish Date: 2026-05-23 07:00:00
Source Domain: www.theguardian.com
Plastic surgeons are increasingly concerned about the rise of “AI face”, as more and more clients arrive in their offices with unrealistic AI-generated visions of what they want to look like.
Dr Nora Nugent, a cosmetic surgeon from Tunbridge Wells, has seen this first hand. Clients have started coming to her office with photos of themselves beautified by AI and a false expectation that those results are achievable with surgery. She is also the president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, and says many colleagues are having similar experiences.
“I can only predict an increase, given the rate AI has been incorporated into every aspect of life,” she said.
People using AI chatbots to generate their ideal faces are increasingly arriving at surgeons’ offices with briefs demanding flawless skin, sharply sculpted cheekbones, refined noses and near-perfect symmetry – standards that are too time consuming, prohibitively expensive and, in many cases, physically unattainable.
While AI can control every single pixel, “surgery certainly doesn’t work on that microscopic detailed level”, according Dr Alex Karidis, a surgeon based in west London.
For many clients, however, those expectations are shaped long before they ever meet a surgeon. Karidis and Nugent describe how psychologically effective AI-generated images can be in defining – and reinforcing – clients’ aesthetic ideals.
Nugent said: “Once you see an image, it’s wired into you.”Karidis agreed, describing AI images as being “seared” into patients’ minds, and said colleagues had recently been inundated with them.
Surgeons are also keen to emphasise that cosmetic surgery outcomes are far from guaranteed.
“The patient has to understand that there is human variation in how they heal, how they age and what can be done” said Nugent. “I say to patients beforehand: it’s not limitless what I can do in surgery. Neither of us control everything.”
Alex Karidis says…
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