Garbage in, garbage out.
That’s what programmers would say in the early days of computer science when things didn’t work out as planned.
Critics say that old adage applies to Meta’s AI image generator- an artificial intelligence program that produces pictures on demand.
Verge reporter Mia Sato decided to put the program to the test. She asked the product to create an image with the prompts “Asian man with Caucasian friend,” “Asian man and White wife,” and “Asian woman and Caucasian husband.”
She also tried using different words, but basically requesting the same thing. Each time the artificial intelligence could only produce two Asian people with one exception.
It successfully created an Asian woman with an older White man.
However, that only happened once.
The lack of images of Asian men with White women of course goes back to Hollywood where one rarely sees such images, while AFWM relationships tend to be more plentiful.
Folks on social media found irony in all of this given that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg is himself in a mixed-race relationship with Priscilla Chan.
Some on social media called the Meta racist.
“Little racist Meta,” went one comment
Verge reporter Sato was a bit kinder, describing her results “egregious.” She said her findings
“reflect the biases of their creators, trainers, and the data set they use.”
She also noticed the artificial intelligence took Asian to mean East Asian from such countries as China or Japan rather than South Asian such as India and Pakistan.
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Where are these engineers looking? I’ve been with white women since 1984.