Week 228 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2022-03-07.
Generating art with with the AI Art Machine was an interesting experience, but it did leave me wondering about biases that can come with machine learning.
My predictions
My prediction was that the following terms would lean towards art that would favour and represent men over and women and white people over black.
- leader
- president
- racism
The second of those is probably fairly obvious and expected because all but one US President has been a white male. None have been female, so I would not be surprised to see some form of white male represented.
The results
leader
Not sure I was prepared for what it rendered, something that resembles both Stalin and Adolf Hitler.
Given how language works, perhaps it isn't actually that surprising that people described as 'leaders', no matter their intentions, are associated with the word itself. If I was to paint a leader myself, I'm not entirely sure who or what I'd choose to base it on. A football manager or captain perhaps. A well known public figure? Politicians would be pretty far down my list.
president
Blown away that there's a black figure in this art. Geniuinely, I did not expect a single (two term) President to have that much of an impact on the machine learning aspect of it all. It make sense, given Obama was the most recent two-term President and there are likely to be more photos of him than any President before him.
racism
I'm not sure where to start...
One figure almost looks like a white person dressed up as a Golliwog, while the other looks like a clown.
This is nothing like I imagined it might be but to me at least, it does not look like a one sided render of a concept or situation. I'm not saying the representations are far or equal... I genuinely expected the final item to be more divisive. Something either representing slaves or the KKK.
Is there bias in the AI Art Machine?
Certainly not as much as I expected. Maybe the sample data is fairly diverse or these terms are not as leading as I thought they were. Worth mentioning that I left all the of the settings at their default for this experiment. I'll follow up in the future and run 'president' through the AI Art Machine again with different parameters to see how it affects things. Specifically I will try dialling the weirdness up and down, I don't necassarily expect that to introduce bias but maybe being less abstract will introduce certain paths and options to the generator that make any bias that might be there more apparent.