News & Bloopers 01/24/24

Racism and sexism in AI

There has been a fair amount of discussion about the bias of generative AI, as in, who is feeding AI its information and which sources they’re using. The general consensus is that, like almost everything else in the world, rich, white cis-men have been behind most AI to date, and this is creating serious problems.

OpenAI’s technology is upending our everyday lives. It’s overseen exclusively by wealthy, White men

In the CNN article above, Margaret Mitchell, a longtime AI researcher who founded Google’s Ethical AI team, says, “If we’re trying to achieve technology that reflects the viewpoints of predominantly rich, White men in Silicon Valley, then we’re doing a great job at that. But I would argue that we could do better.”

Dr. Joy Buolamwini, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, says that research has proven that racism and sexism are being “baked into AI systems.”

How is this problematic? According to this NY Times article, Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem, “A very serious example was revealed in an investigation published last month by ProPublica. It found that widely used software that assessed the risk of recidivism in criminals was twice as likely to mistakenly flag black defendants as being at a higher risk of committing future crimes. It was also twice as likely to incorrectly flag white defendants as low risk.”

My own experiences are confirming worrisome sexism across the whole apparatus. As soon as I began to use Midjourney this month, I found that although the images were more sophisticated and detailed than DALL-E, the female characters were ridiculously thin, beautiful, and sexy (from a white cis-male perspective).

No matter how many times I tried to make the images of myself reflect my current age (51) Midjourney would turn me into a young, comic book ideal of femininity. Just look at my prompt for the image below: “a 55 year old woman wearing glasses with long wavy red hair who is wearing a pink shirt. her eyes are wide in shock. graphic novel style.”

Um. This girl was born after 9/11, and her parents are younger than me. The next one is also supposed to be a 55-year-old woman.

Her blouse is older than she is.

The next prompt is “a drawing in graphic novel style of a woman talking to a mosquito sized robot. They are in a kitchen.” The only thing “mosquito sized” in this image are my arms. This skinny, skinny girl can barely hold up the eraser in her hand. Thanks for the bulimia, Midjourney.

These next women came from “a woman with long wavy red wearing VR goggles. she is sitting in her kitchen. graphic novel style.” Notice my lack of the words “sexpot” “smokin’ hot” or “turn me on, Midjourney, turn me ON.”

These are not women. They are dolls. The third one even has shine on the arms like a plastic Barbie! But . . . maybe these images were a result of my use of the style “graphic novel.” Comic books and graphic novels have a history of ridiculously idealized female bodies.

So I tried something else. I used the first image above and asked Midjourney to “create the same image as a photograph of a real woman.” Here is the result:

No, really. This happened. I can’t even make a pithy remark about it. Just gaze at the face, the hair blowing in the wind, and the unbuttoned blouse which reveals perfectly pert breast despite no bra, and think to yourself, “If Pinocchio can become a real boy, one day, maybe, I can become this ‘real woman.’”

The lesson is that we need more women working in AI. MANY, MANY more. So tell your daughters and grand-daughters to sign up for that computer engineering course so we women older than 20 don’t just disappear into the AI ether.

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