In a Guardian opinion piece, historian and author Joseph de Weck argues that just as photoshopped bodies once made people feel physically inadequate, AI is now making people feel intellectually inadequate too. He traces the idea back to philosopher Günther Anders, who predicted in 1956 that as machines grew ever more perfect, humans would feel ashamed of their "imperfect" bodies and increasingly strive to resemble products rather than accept their natural, "archaic" origins.

De Weck links this to today's boom in cheaper cosmetic surgery, where the goal is often not a natural look but a standardised, symmetrical "product-like" appearance, as seen in looksmaxxing trends and celebrity transformations that trigger an "uncanny valley" unease, a concept coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970. He extends Anders' theory to argue that this sense of inferiority towards machines, once confined to appearance, is now extending to the mind itself as AI outperforms human cognition, citing unexplained changes in the faces of figures such as John Travolta and Carla Bruni as prompts for his reflection.