A beauty magazine illustrated a story about cosmetic procedures with AI-generated women rather than photographs, and the prompts that made them ended up in print, PetaPixel reports. Austin photographer and cinematographer Cassandra Klepac bought a copy of Beauty Authority at an airport, was impressed by the pictures and looked for the photographer's credit. She found the generation prompts instead, as The Mary Sue first reported.
The subject is what troubled her. The piece was about how procedures affect real women, and in an Instagram Reel liked almost 150,000 times by viewers Klepac asked why invented faces stood in for real bodies, and whether readers should trust health advice set beside them. She set one printed prompt, describing a confident woman in her thirties in a white swimsuit, against the article's own line about confidence being a feeling, and said the woman pictured had never looked in a mirror. As someone who photographs ordinary women who doubt they are photogenic, she said the shortcut felt wrong.
PetaPixel says Klepac seemed less concerned about lost work for photographers than about publications using synthetic people to illustrate stories about real ones. Most commenters on her Reel agreed. Some said nobody would have known the images were fake had the prompts not been printed and called for AI rules; others said the shortcut took paid jobs from models.
The outlet links it to wider rows over AI in fashion and beauty images: Dove's 2024 pledge never to use AI to create or distort women's looks, a suit by model Francheska Pujols against a retailer that placed her photos in AI backdrops and changed her poses, and H&M's AI "digital twins" of its models, which split opinion when the retailer introduced them.
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