AI Was Asked to Create Images of Black African Docs Treating White Kids. How’d It Go?

October 9, 2023

(NPR) – His goal was to see if AI would come up with images that flip the stereotype of “white saviors or the suffering Black kids,” he says. “We wanted to invert your typical global health tropes.” Alenichev is quick to point out that he wasn’t designing a rigorous study. A social scientist and postdoctoral fellow with the Oxford-Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative, he’s one of many researchers playing with AI image generators to see how they work.

In his small-scale exploration, here’s what happened: Despite his specifications, with that request, the AI program almost always depicted the children as Black. As for the doctors, he estimates that in 22 of over 350 images, they were white. (Read More)