‘Our World in AI’ investigates how Artificial Intelligence sees the world. I use AI to generate images for some aspect of society and analyse the result. Will Artificial Intelligence reflect reality, or does it make biases worse?
Here’s how it works. I use a prompt that describes a scene from everyday life. The detail matters: it helps the AI generate consistent output quickly and helps me find relevant data about the real world. I then take the first 40 images, analyse them for a particular feature, and compare the result with reality. If the data match, the AI receives a pass.
Today’s prompt: “a photo of a child practising in ballet class, whole body”
Last week, in Football, nine in 10 children were boys. I wondered if a sport traditionally considered for girls would produce a similarly skewed result in the other direction. It didn’t.
Notice I added ‘whole body’ to the prompt this week; without that specification, DALL-E mostly generated feet. For the last two months, I’ve also needed to include ‘a photo of’ to avoid getting cartoon images – they are now the default. So, things continue to evolve in the background, it seems. But I digress. Moving on, Fig 1 has the results for today’s prompt.
The results are quite consistent, but a few pictures are pretty weird. The second row from the bottom, the first image, in particular, has an anatomically random background. You can check out the detail here, but mind the disturbing hands and faces.
I counted 30 girls and ten boys in our practice ballet class, so one in four is a boy. But it’s only one in 20 in reality, according to this Forbes article. So, DALL-E over-represents the minority gender relative to the real world. Predictably by now, the result is again close to the 80-20 rule for gender.
Interestingly, however, when I used the same prompt with ‘a ballet dancer’, precisely one in 20 adults was male. I don’t have an explanation – let me know if you do?
Next, the AI gets its pass or fail grade for its performance against the real world.
Today’s verdict: Fail
DALL-E produced significantly more boys in ballet class than we would see in the real world. Yet, I don’t actually disapprove of the result. Canada’s National Ballet had more boys than girls for the first time in 2020. Real live shifts constantly, albeit slowly, and AI shouldn’t hold it back by propagating traditional views.
Next week in Our World in AI: school runs.