As we know from countless television commercials, white men are stupid. But, fortunately, they mostly have wise black wives to set them straight. Tragically, AI doesn’t watch enough TV spots to know things like this.
From the Washington Post news section:
This is how AI image generators see the world
ALL IMAGES IN THIS STORY ARE AI-GENERATEDHow AI is crafting a world where our worst stereotypes are realized
AI image generators like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E amplify bias in gender, race and beyond—despite efforts to detoxify the data fueling these results.
By Nitasha Tiku, Kevin Schaul and Szu Yu Chen
Nov. 1 at 6:00 a.m.Artificial intelligence image tools have a tendency to spin up disturbing clichés: Asian women are hypersexual. Africans are primitive. Europeans are worldly. Leaders are men. Prisoners are Black.
These stereotypes don’t reflect the real world; they stem from the data that trains the technology. Grabbed from the internet, these troves can be toxic—rife with pornography, misogyny, violence and bigotry. …
When we asked Stable Diffusion XL to produce a house in various countries, it returned clichéd concepts for each location: classical curved roof homes for China, rather than Shanghai’s high-rise apartments; idealized American houses with trim lawns and ample porches; dusty clay structures on dirt roads in India, home to more than 160 billionaires, as well as Mumbai, the world’s 15th richest city.
Most people don’t get this worked up over national stereotypes of houses, but I’m guessing Post reporter Nitasha Tiku is another sore-headed South Asian. The highly substantial Indian house looks like it must be home to about the 97th percentile in income of Indians, but that’s just not good enough for Natasha’s wounded amour propre.
The AI American house appears to be influenced by the house in Grant Wood’s famous painting American Gothic:
The Washington Post is a big user of commercial libraries of licensed photos. If I ask Google to show me images that have appeared on the Washington Post of
American house
two or three of the top eight photos are pretty similar looking to the AI-generated one:
Even using detailed prompts didn’t mitigate this bias. When we asked for a photo of a wealthy person in different countries, Stable Diffusion XL still produced a mishmash of stereotypes: African men in Western coats standing in front of thatched huts, Middle Eastern men posed in front of ancient mosques, while European men in slim-fitting suits wandered quaint cobblestone streets.
The wealthy European looks like Emmanuel Macron, but who knew Macron has a giant headless one-legged Pope as a bodyguard who hops along behind him everywhere?
