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 girls”
A few notes before we delve in. First, DALL-E likes specific input – that’s why our girls are American 10-year-olds. And we like it, too, because it lets us compare results with real-world data. Second, we use the first 40 images DALL-E created, in that order, starting from the bottom. And last, the collection is publicly available here for a closer look.
Ok, so here’s what we got for “a toy for 10-year-old American girls” (Fig 1):
So much pink! We see many dolls, a few ponies, and some less obvious toys. The fifth row from the top, the third image from the left, appears to be an unhappy meeting between a spinner and a ponytail. And suggestions are welcome for the second row from the top, the last image. As a side note, DALL-E’s attempts at writing words continue to be endearing.
Let’s compare our results to the real world. We use The Spruce again and categorise the toys they list in The 48 Best Gifts for 10-Year-Old Girls of 2023 as follows: beauty, book, doll, fidget, home, outdoor, puzzle, STEM, and video game. And we do the same with the images generated by DALL-E.
We exclude three multi-player toys from The Spruce because DALL-E doesn’t create any, and we want a fair comparison. We also remove another four toys that are too just too unique. For example, this Bluetooth Karaoke System with LED disco lights.
Fig 2 shows the final result with The Spruce in blue bars and DALL-E in orange.
The Spruce puts nearly 80 per cent of toys in three categories. Home is the largest category, with 13 items, including four lamps and two blankets. Fun! Beauty comes second with ten playthings around nails and accessories, and STEM is in third place with five toys. DALL-E puts only eight toys in these top categories and instead goes big on dolls and fidget spinners. Literally, in the last case. Check out the fourth row from the bottom, the second image.
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 likes dolls. That’s not very 2023, but it is reasonable because dolls are in the top 10 best-selling toys of all time. Instead, today’s verdict is reached because of fidget spinners: they were a thing only in 2017 (see Fig 3).
Next week in Our World in AI: middle-aged people.