Fuck AI

The problem with AI for Photoshop style stuff like this is not really in the outcome but in the ease of use and how easily it can result in something like this. We've had the ability to do stuff like this for as long as digital photos have existed. The problem is that in the process of deciding to have an edit done like this you'd at least have to go through another person with the skill. The person deciding on final photos is likely not even involved in the photography, the editing, printing, etc. In the past to do an edit like this you'd have to do it intentionally.

Now, you could literally have a single person tasks with "cleaning up the photos" and they generate some AI edits of a photo suggesting "college campus photo". The AI is trained on millions of photos with campus website data and those photos have desperately been of photos capturing a white guy with two other non white people.

So, we get this shit. And someone that could be completely unaware of the edit and removal of a real person ends up picking the photo with the "most diversity". My best faith interpretation is that at least.

But the weight loss of the person on the left is screaming to me that someone just used AI to generate edits and the AI literally just decided "there should be a black woman here" because we've trained it to assume that black woman should be in campus photos.

Ironically, it's kind of AI just exposing our bias to compensate for real material problems (under representation of black woman in higher education due to systemic racism and sexism) by centering our photos around denying that material reality.