An AI portrait generator called Playground AI altered an Asian-American woman's appearance to make her look Caucasian when she requested a 'professional LinkedIn profile photo', lightening her complexion and changing her eye color.
On Friday, Rona Wang, a 24-year-old MIT graduate who is Asian-American, uploaded a picture of herself wearing a red MIT sweatshirt to Playground AI's image creator and requested it turn the image into 'a professional LinkedIn profile photo'. The AI system produced an image nearly identical to her original selfie except it made her complexion appear lighter and her eyes blue, features that made her look Caucasian. Wang shared the result on Twitter where it gained traction and sparked conversation about AI bias related to race. Playground AI founder Suhail Doshi responded within two hours, explaining that the models 'aren't instructable like that so it'll pick any generic thing based on the prompt' and that they were 'quite displeased with this and hope to solve it'. Doshi also noted that Playground AI doesn't support the use-case of AI photo avatars and that it 'definitely can't preserve identity of a face and restylize it'. The incident occurred amid a TikTok trend where people use AI products to create professional LinkedIn profile photos.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
Unequal treatment of individuals or groups by AI, often based on race, gender, or other sensitive characteristics, resulting in unfair outcomes and unfair representation of those groups.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed