As is pervasive in many elements of life and technology, A.I.-generated art has a bias against Black people.
Black artists who use the technology in their work, like Brooklyn, New York-based artist Stephanie Dinkins, warn against the technology’s penchant for getting depictions of Black people and scenes of Black-dominated places wrong.
According to the New York Times, for the past seven years, Dinkins has experimented with A.I.’s ability to realistically depict Black women, smiling and crying, using a variety of keyphrases. Her early attempts left a lot to be desired, as her algorithm produced a figure in a black cloak rather than a Black person.
“I expected something with a little more semblance of Black womanhood,” she said.
While the technology has improved over the last seven years and has now reached mainstream status, Dinkins said she still runs into challenges, regardless of the key terms used to prompt generators. She sees especially high instances of errors when it comes to facial features and hair textures.
“Improvements obscure some of the deeper questions we should be asking about discrimination,” Dinkins told the New York Times.
She added, “The biases are embedded deep in these systems, so it becomes ingrained and automatic. If I’m working within a system that uses algorithmic ecosystems, then I want that system to know who Black people are in nuanced ways so that we can feel better supported.”
The New York Times reports Dinkins is expressing frustrations held by many Black artists attempting to incorporate the technology into their practices. In both the large data sets that teach A.I. machines how to generate images and the programs that run the algorithms, Black artists are running into racial bias. In some instances, A.I. technology seems to ignore or even override artists’ prompts, impacting how Black people are depicted in images. In other…
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