"Out of 100 avatars I generated, 16 were topless, and in another 14 it had put me in extremely skimpy clothes and overtly sexualized poses,” Heikkilä wrote.
Just to qualify first; asian women are certainly highly festishized in general, so I’d totally believe there’s some gross bias, so I don’t discount the possibility.
But, that said, when I messed around with AI image generators pretty much any kind of prompt that included woman or female designations tended towards sexualized versions, even to the point of violating its own content policy.
I asked it to create a sort of witchy, sorceress character and many of the generations she was fully topless with her boobs out, despite me not asking that or even explicitly putting “fully clothed” into the prompt. There was one image that the system created and then removed and threatened me with a ban for it being too sexualized despite me putting no sexual language in the prompt and it being all the AI.
All that to say, I think AI like this is reflective of societies hyper-sexualization of women of all kinds, it doesn’t come as a great surprise.
Because AI is the literal worst.
Because we have been pornifying asian women on the internet for decades. Does that really beg the question posed in the title?
You’re absolutely correct, yet ask someone who’s very pro AI and they might dismiss such claims as “needing better prompts”. Also many people may not be as tech informed as you are, and bringing light to algorithmic bias can help them understand and navigate the world we now live in. Dismissing the article just because you already know the answer doesn’t really encourage people to participate in a discussion.
