Seven years ago, MIT debuted a landmark project , which allowed everyday people to photograph and rate their streets like a Hot or Not for cities. It was a powerful showcase of how crowdsourcing opinions from citizens could help quantify a city’s appeal and, in theory, help urban designers plan better cities.

Less than a decade later, artificial intelligence is taking this idea so much further. FaceLift is a new AI system developed by Nokia Bell Labs Cambridge that allows scientists and urban planners to use a crowd’s aggregated sensibility to actually redesign the look of city streets. FaceLift AI can take any Google Street View scene and beautify it instantly—but at what cost?

To create FaceLift, 82,000 volunteers from 162 countries were tasked with rating 20,000 Google Street View images as beautiful or ugly. That data was pumped into an AI that then deconstructed people’s preferences by features in these scenes: It learned picnic areas, orchards, and plazas were considered beautiful, while viaducts and construction sites were not. (Who knew?!?) Then in a final step, a “generative” AI system was tasked with beautifying images of a street by editing it with newly generated imagery (much like how a deepfake is made).

You can see the results for yourself in FaceLift’s interactive map of areas around Boston. It’s in part a heat map that shows where beloved and hated features can be found in the city. It also includes a few side-by-sides of pre- and post-beautified streets on the map. The remade streets are completely unrecognizable compared to the originals, and you can learn a lot about what we consider beautiful by taking a look for yourself:

I expected to see streets made over with fountains and fancy landscaping. Instead, the revised versions get decidedly less sexy adjustments such as crosswalks and sidewalks, because people find such public resources beautiful (perhaps for the same reason they find greenery beautiful—these pedestrian considerations imply a certain safety and security). You can also see that people prefer densely built streets lined with parked cars to more open areas, even if they have green fields and plentiful open parking (it’s amazing how spacious areas in a city actually appear barren rather than luxurious).