Artificial intelligence can create images that look eerily real, and some people are even successfully using its powers to generate professional headshots of themselves.
But women of color are saying that the images they receive are overtly sexual.
In a tweet posted on Saturday, artist Lana Denina shared the AI-generated headshots that she received after submitting reference photos of herself to Remini, an AI photo enhancer and editor.
Though the reference photos she submitted showed her fully clothed, all of Remini’s headshots of Denina included considerable cleavage. One even shows her in an unbuttoned blazer with nothing underneath it.
Black women have historically been hypersexualized from a young age. Denina said she felt that Remini AI is continuing this harmful practice.
“The AI oversexualized me due to my features that have been fetishized for centuries,” Denina wrote in her tweet. “AI is biased for POC [people of color]. I’m horrified.”
In replies to her viral tweet, Denina added that she tried creating professional, non-sexual headshots using “all the corporate templates” on Remini. She said that she tried her images “multiple times.” (The Daily Dot reached out to Denina and Remini.)
Adesa (@megantheeponie), another woman of color who used Remini for headshots, replied to Denina’s tweet saying she got similar results. In an attached photo, the AI-generated woman is wearing an unbuttoned blazer with nothing underneath it.
If you want to learn how to generate AI women, there are several generators online. You enter text to customize the appearance of the AI girl.
“How did the model image I chose and the picture I posted generate the cleavage??” Adesa wrote in a now-deleted tweet.
AI’s innate biases concerning race and gender aren’t new. Joy Buolamwini, head of the Algorithmic Justice League, wrote for Time in 2019 that the way that many AI systems are created leads to glaring blind spots in what they’re able to detect and create.
“These systems are often trained on images of predominantly light-skinned men,” Buolamwini wrote.
She says these training practices lead to “the coded gaze” or “the bias in artificial intelligence that can lead to discriminatory or exclusionary practices.”
A study was released last year by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Washington, and the Technical University of Munich.
They found that robots who were trained by AI became racist and sexist, therefore adopting the biases within AI.
After posting the headshots Remini generated for her online, Denina shared that she was harassed by “misogynists and racists incels… who were triggered after seeing AI boobs.”
“I had to block at least 30 individuals,” Denina tweeted. “Our world is damned.”
Who is the female model created by AI?
Meet Aitana López, an AI-generated woman who earns up to $11,000 a month on social media. She was created by a Spanish modeling agency after having difficulty with real models and influencers.
“We started analyzing how we were working and realized that many projects were being put on hold or canceled due to problems beyond our control. Often it was the fault of the influencer or model and not due to design issues,” Rubeñ Cruz, the founder of the modeling agency, said an in interview with Euronews.
“We did it so that we could make a better living and not be dependent on other people who have egos, who have manias, or who just want to make a lot of money by posing,” he added.
