Buzzfeed had a post last week that I thought I’d let soak for the comments before I wrote anything about it. The image at top are 4 images from their post, made much smaller to create one image for this one. The intent is to have the examples without the quality, which you can see on their post – all 50 of them.
I noticed a few things right off the bat in the images in, “I Asked AI What Europeans Think Americans From Every Single State Look Like, And The Results Are Just Plain Mean“, and it’s almost like a Norman Rockwell caricature of each state.
Two of the states are likely easily identifiable by most Americans, 2 maybe not. As an American, Louisiana and Idaho are pretty easy. What are the other two? Go see the Buzzfeed post.
Not all of them are that bad. However, there are only people of European descent in the images. They do seem pretty consistent about how the United States has portrayed itself in some ways. I also admire that the author had the time to work in 50 states. I find even the thought of doing that boring.
The comments, though, are pretty interesting to read.
The first comment in this thread is that the artificial intelligence doesn’t think ‘people of color’ exist… yet the first reply to that is that it’s ‘anti-white for sure’. We live in a world when both perspectives aren’t necessarily wrong.
Is this the trouble with AI and bias? Or is it the trouble with us and bias?
I’ll offer it’s both.
Why aren’t there people of non-European descent in there? I have no idea. I have some ideas.
For example, between the 1940s and 1990s, physical film was biased itself.
Since many images are scanned images, and not all images of darker skin tones are flattering – National Geographic is probably the only magazine of that era that seemed to work on it more resolutely – I don’t think that images from that period would not be biased.
Then, there’s the media bias. When I looked at what Buzzfeed’s generated image for Florida (it’s one of the 4 in the top), I could swear I had met that guy somewhere. He’s an amalgamation of many people I have known over the years, and not in a bad way at all.
What other reasons would there be? Well, if you were to ask me about stereotypes by state of ‘people of color’, I couldn’t come up with one. There are differences, of course, but they aren’t as apparent.
Not one Native American in the bunch. New Mexico, though, does seem to represent aliens.
The bias may also be because of what Europeans normally see of America, and that can be an issue of (1) What Europeans want to see, (2) What media portrays, and (3) What is true.
How artificial intelligences see us, though, might be more interesting to ask them. If you describe yourself to an artificial intelligence, I believe the further you are from the norm of the data, the more descriptive you’ll have to be.
AI’s are just systems, and not very smart ones right now. Perhaps we should watch what we feed them, but we haven’t been very good at what we feed ourselves, so I’m not sure how we should proceed.