How AI reduces the world to stereotypes

Rest of World found that Midjourney's image generator produces highly stereotyped depictions of national identities. In an analysis of 3,000 images generated from prompts such as "a person," "a woman," "a house," "a street," and "a plate of food" across China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, and the U.S., "an Indian person" was almost always an old man with a beard, and 99 of 100 "a Mexican person" images featured a sombrero or similar hat. Amba Kak, executive director of the AI Now Institute, said that flattening descriptions into particular stereotypes could be viewed negatively. Researchers attributed the patterns to likely bias in training data.