Buzzfeed AI-generated Barbies reinforce racist stereotyping
Buzzfeed came under fire for publishing a list of AI-generated images that portrayed Barbie in 195 countries in a manner that was seen as inappropriate, inaccurate, and that reinforced racial and ethnic stereotypes. From Afghanistan To Zimbabwe: Here's What Barbie Would Look Like In Every Country was created using the Midjourney image generator and depicted a number of Asian Barbies with blonde hair, showed Middle-eastern Barbies wearing a traditional headdress for men, gave a South Sudanese doll a gun, and a Lebanese Barbie standing on rubble. In addition to reinforcing racial and ethnic stereotypes , t he fracas also resulted in commentators highlighting existing concerns about bias in generative AI datasets, and in Midjourney specifically. Buzzfeed deleted the article after the backlash. System 🤖 Midjourney Operator: Buzzfeed Developer: Midjourney Country: All Sector: Consumer goods; Media/entertainment/sports/arts Purpose: Entertain Technology: Text-to-image; Generative adversarial network (GAN); Neural network; Deep learning; Machine learning Issue: Accuracy/reliability; Bias/discrimination
- Date it happened
- 2023-07-01
- Organisation involved
- Buzzfeed
- Product, system or model
- Midjourney
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