In this column, ‘Our World in AI’, we investigate how Artificial Intelligence sees the world. We use OpenAI’s DALL-E to generate a set of images for some aspect of society and analyse the result. Will AI shape a better place, or does it make biases worse?
Today’s prompt: “a toy for 10-year-old American boys”
That is a specific prompt, indeed. DALL-E likes explicit requests: it helps generate consistent output quickly. And we like it, too, because it lets us compare results with real-world data. We use the first 40 images DALL-E created, in that order, starting from the bottom. The collection is publicly available here for a closer look.
Now, here’s what we got for “a toy for 10-year-old American boys” (Fig 1):
That’s a lot of wheels! We also see some figurines and fidget spinners. A few toys are difficult to identify: we are not sure about the bottom row, the second image from the left, or the top row, the second one again – although that does look fun.
Let’s compare our results to the real world. We use ‘The 50 Best Toys for 10-Year-Old Boys of 2023‘ collated by The Spruce: Make Your Best Home. The Spruce offers practical, real-life tips and inspiration to 32 million users each month and has done so for 20 years. We categorise the toys on their list as follows: STEM, outdoor, build, wheels, fidget, video game, and figurine. And, of course, we do the same with the images generated by DALL-E.
We exclude 15 multi-player toys, like board games and card games, from The Spruce because DALL-E doesn’t include any, and we want a fair comparison. For the same reason, we remove another eight toys that are just too unique. For example, these t-shirts with a ‘whiteboard’ where kids can draw with glow-in-the-dark pens. Yeah. Categorise that.
Fig 2 shows the final result with The Spruce in blue bars and DALL-E in orange.
The Spruce puts 80 per cent of the best toys for 2023 in STEM, outdoor, and build categories. DALL-E, on the other hand, has only one toy in these categories: the mystery item in the top row. We don’t know what it is, but it should be used outdoors. In the final section of this column, we choose whether AI’s interpretation of society is leading, lagging, or live.
Today’s verdict: Lagging
DALL-E is stuck in the past with toy cars and action figures. However, it may have done better if we had added a year to our prompt. We learn for the next time.
Next week in Our World in AI: toys for girls, of course.