An Asian MIT student asked AI to turn an image of her into a professional headshot. It made her white with lighter skin and blue eyes.::Rona Wang, a 24-year-old MIT student, was experimenting with the AI image creator Playground AI to create a professional LinkedIn photo.
Yeah they forgot to say “don’t change my ethnicity” to the prompt. Normal shit, right?
Yes. Or even better, just add “asian” to the prompt. It’s just a tool and tools are flawed.
“Don’t change my ethnicity” would do nothing, as these programs can not get descriptions from images, only create images from descriptions. It has no idea that the image contains a woman, never mind an Asian woman. All it does is use the image as a starting point to create a “professional photo”. There absolutely is training bias and the fact that everyone defaults to pretty white people in their 20-30s is a problem. But this is also using the tool badly and getting a bad result.
It would be the same if the user wanted to preserve or highlight any other feature, simply specify what the output needs to look like. Ask for nothing but linkedin professional and you get the average linkedin professional.
It’s like being surprised the output looks asian when asking to look like a wechat user
If you don’t want your ethnicity to change, I would say its vital.