Twenty One

 The 21 portraits on this page were created with Midjourney version 7, an AI-based image generator. The text prompt requests a portrait of a beautiful woman of age 21, describes the studio setup and the model’s expression, and stipulates that the model wears a discrete golden necklace with a small hanger. For each portrait, the prompt specifies a different origin or ethnicity. The resulting images were postprocessed in Adobe Lightroom as usual. The model names were chosen from a list of popular first names for each relevant region, produced by ChatGPT.

Midjourney version 7 offers a maximum image size of 2048 by 2048 pixels (for square images). Large prints would thus suffer from quality loss, although smart image upscalers may be able to alleviate this limitation. A more fundamental issue is the apparent lack of diversity. My personal beauty preferences obviously introduced a significant selection bias and may have limited the variation. Still, Midjourney shares some of the blame. It sometimes seemed to start from one and the same person, creating different ethnicities by slightly adjusting facial features. I attempted to avoid such “doubles” in my final selection. Also, some portraits show an uncanny resemblance to some celebrity – at least to my eye. This is perhaps not surprising: Midjourney must have encountered many celebrity pictures during training.