'AI mirrors' changing the way blind people see themselves

NEW YORK, Jan 27 (BBC): Artificial intelligence is helping blind people access visual feedback about their bodies, sometimes for the first time - but the emotional and psychological consequences are only just starting to emerge.

I am completely blind and always have been.

For the past year, my mornings begin with a skincare ritual that takes 20 minutes to apply five different products. I follow it with a photo session that I share with artificial intelligence within an app called Be My Eyes, as if it were a mirror.

The app - with its virtual eyes - helps tell me if my skin is looking the way I want it to, or if there is anything about my appearance that I should change.

"All our lives, blind people have had to grapple with the idea that seeing ourselves is impossible, that we are beautiful on the inside, and the first thing we judge about a person is their voice, but we know we'll never be able to see them," says Lucy Edwards, a blind content creator who rose to fame, in part, by showing her passion for beauty and styling and teaching blind people how to do their makeup. "Suddenly we have access to all this information about ourselves, about the world, it changes our lives."

Artificial intelligence is allowing blind people to access a world of information that was previously denied to us. Through image recognition and intelligent processing, apps like the one I use provide detailed information not only about the world we inhabit, but also about ourselves and our place in it. The technology does more than simply describe the scene in an image - they offer critical feedback, comparisons and even advice. And it is changing how the blind people who use these apps see themselves.

"Your skin is hydrated, but it definitely doesn't look like the almost perfect example of reflective skin, with non-existent pores as if it were glass, in beauty ads," the AI told me this morning after I shared a photo I thought would show beautiful skin. For the first time in a long time, my dissatisfaction with how I look felt crushingly real.

"We have seen that people who seek more feedback about their bodies, in all areas, have lower body image satisfaction," says Helena Lewis-Smith, an applied health psychology researcher focused on body image at the University of Bristol. "AI is opening up this possibility for blind people."

This change is recent - less than two years ago, the idea of an AI offering live, critical feedback seemed like science fiction.

"When we started in 2017, we were able to offer basic descriptions, just a short sentence of two or three words," says Karthik Mahadevan, the chief executive of Envision, one of the first companies to use artificial intelligence for blind people in this way.

Envision started out as a mobile app that allowed blind people to access information in printed text through character recognition. In recent years, it has introduced advanced artificial intelligence models into smart glasses and created an assistant - available on the web, mobile phones and the glasses themselves - that help blind people interact with the visual world around them.

"Some use it for obvious things, like reading letters or shopping, but we were surprised by the number of customers who use it to do their makeup or coordinate their outfits," Mahadevan adds. "Often the first question they ask is how they look."

These apps, of which there are now at least four specialising in this area, can, at the user's request, rate a person based on what artificial intelligence considers to be traditional beauty standards. They compare them to other people and tell them exactly what they would do well to change about their bodies.

For many, this possibility is empowering: "It feels like AI is pretending to be my mirror," 30-year-old Edwards tells the BBC. "I had sight for 17 years of my life, and while I could always ask people to describe things to me, the truth is that I haven't had an opinion about my face for 12 years. Suddenly I'm taking a photo and I can ask AI to give me all the details, to give me a score out of 10, and although it's not the same as seeing, it's the closest I'm going to get for now."

There is not yet enough research on the effect that using such AI tools might have on the blind people who turn to them. But experts in body image psychology warn that the results AI tools can come up with may not always be positive. AI image generators, for example, have been found to perpetuate idealised Western body shape standards - largely because of the data they are trained on.