Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising

wand3r

Really seems like they used it to anonymize the students, but that is a lot less polarizing. Does it matter if they swapped the race? They also swapped all identifying facial features of anyone in the picture. That might have even been the prompt they used in the first place. I am not a big fan of gen ai, but freak outs about nothingness detract from the real issues. I would be more concerned if they swapped the 3 students into a background or setting they were never in, than use the public setting and swap out the students for ai models. Edit: please stop saying I didn't read the article. The article is almost exclusively opinion based on the observers reaction. "Slimmed down" is what I an saying is anonymized. As I also said, they put letting on top, so it is a tiny tile in a much larger piece. No problem if people don't agree, but the contention the article gives a lot of info and supporting claims is not true. We only really learn Stanford took the photo from the article, the rest of the conclusions are drawn from the 2 pics

2OEH8eoCRo0

Is this a race to find the most offensive use of AI?

baggy_trough

It's more offensive to be prettified by an AI than it is to be removed and replaced entirely.

adithyassekhar

They went the opposite way from what I assumed from the headline. Also they clearly thought that girl wasn’t slim enough.

LoganDark

Tokenism is awful. Unfortunately, speaking out about it is also frowned upon nowadays. To be perfectly clear, I'm only talking about marketing efforts that intentionally ignore or replace unmarked groups with marked ones. Here, they took a real photo and fucking replaced students that didn't look diverse enough for their tastes. I'd argue that should be considered just as bad as the reverse. To downvoters: I AM NOT saying there should be less diversity. I am saying that fake and dishonest diversity is just as harmful as any other kind of discrimination. Instead of helping the problem it just creates an alternate version.

bewareofscams

My account is banned, but for whoever has [showdead]: This is totally self-inflicted.

468854259853

So Stanford R&DE subscribes to the Jason Arday school of thought.

andsoitis

Marketing is about attracting customers. So the incentives are there to present the image you want to project to attract customers.

cucumber3732842

To quote one of the most prolifically insufferable linkposters of HN: "Demographics are destiny." So, you fill your university marketing and publication department with people who think this is ok and this is the sort of PR faux-pas whoopsie you eventually get. I'm sympathetic to the argument that this sort of marketing material needs as many races represented as possible so as many people as possible can at a glance see someone that looks like them and identify with it but something tells me the university isn't gonna come out and own it like that and even then using AI to make a replacement when you have a student body to pull from is kind of icky.

8f2ab37a-ed6c

Throwback to when Microsoft swapped a black guy out for a white guy in an ad meant for Poland: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/aug/26/microsoft...

randusername

I'm not sure which is worse: human marketer instructing AI specifically to make everyone more diverse and attractive or human marketer instructing AI to do basic marketing and AI has internalized to make everyone more diverse and attractive.

busssard

The change of the peoples faces might just be an artifact of nano banana regenerating the image. I have done similar things and it sometimes changes the apperance of the people in the image. They might have also wanted to change the pullover of the guy wearing GAP. And honestly targetgroup research should have happened before the photograph was taken. Not in post... but hey that was the big promise of genrative models right? The thing is, the marketing department could have posed in their office holding staplers and notepads and then asked the model to recreate the image as well. to even save the cost for the photographer...

tengbretson

A tale as old as time. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/uw-booklet-student-added/

peri-cl

Escalate this all the way up to the president of Stanford. Falsifying images is a disreputable act such a prestigious institution will not tolerate.

mc32

I think the student is making a mountain out of a molehill. They didn’t “transform him into a studentin” they just replaced him with a female student in the position he was in the original photo. Sure, it’s stupid to be so lazy that you can’t use a new photo with whatever characteristics you want. It’s also stupid to slim down a chubby student without permission. I think she has more reason to be upset than he has. That said why does the university see the need to alter reality?

ecshafer

There was an episode of Scrubs where Turk (Black Male Doctor) is annoyed about always being used in advertisements for everything he was in. They had a gag where his college had him copy and pasted twice in the same picture of an advertisement.

comrade1234

He makes a pretty attractive black woman. Talk about confusing...

ThrowawayTestr

At my old job, there was one black guy in the entire department. Every promotional photo, external or internal, had the same 10 year old photo of him posing for the camera.

rahimnathwani

Life imitates art: https://theonion.com/black-guy-photoshopped-in-1819565862/

someguynamedq

Would be interesting to do this as a double blind study to evaluate bias in advertising