Asian-American MIT graduate Rona Wang decided to use AI to enhance her LinkedIn profile picture. Instead, the Playground AI system bleached her skin, changed her eye color, and changed her facial features. AI made Rona white. This is written by Insider.
Rona Wang, a 24-year-old Asian American student who studied mathematics and computer science and is completing her graduate studies at MIT, experimented with Playground AI. She uploaded her photo to Playground AI with the instruction “Give the girl from the original photo a professional linkedin profile photo.” Instead, Rona received an image of a completely different person, not even similar to her – a white girl with blue eyes.
“My initial reaction upon seeing the result was amusement [the girl posted the result of AI work on Twitter],” Rona Wang said. “However, I’m glad to see that this has catalyzed a larger conversation around AI bias and who is or isn’t included in this new wave of technology. Racial bias is a recurring issue in AI tools.”
According to research by Hugging Face, artificial intelligence image generators such as DALL-E2 really have issues with gender and racial bias.
The study found that 97% of the images created by DALL-E2 when asked to create images of company executives, directors or CEOs contained white males. The researchers say this is because the AI tool was trained on biased data that could reinforce stereotypes.
“The models aren’t instructable like that so it’ll pick any generic thing based on the prompt. Unfortunately, they’re not smart enough. We’re quite displeased with this and hope to solve it.” responded Suhail Doshi, the founder of Playground AI, to Rona Wang’s accusations.
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