Meta’s ‘racist’ AI can’t imagine Asian men with white women
AN AI image generator made by Facebook’s parent company has been called ‘racist’ after users found it was unable to imagine a mixed-race couple.
Meta’s AI tool is able to take almost any written prompt and convert it into a shockingly realistic image within seconds.
But users found the AI couldn’t create images showing mixed-race couples, despite the fact Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is married to an Asian woman, Priscilla Chan, who is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America,
Social media commenters saw this as an example of the AI’s racial bias. One described it as ‘racist software made by racist engineers’.
Mia Sato, a reporter at The Verge, tried generating images using prompts like ‘Asian man and Caucasian friend’ or ‘Asian man and white wife’.
She discovered that only once across ‘dozens’ of tests was the AI able to show a white man and Asian woman.
In all other cases, Meta’s AI returned images of East Asian men and women.
Changing the request to ‘Asian man with Caucasian friend’ also failed to produce any correct results.
Ms Sato wrote: ‘The image generator not being able to conceive of Asian people standing next to white people is egregious.’
Ms Sato does not accuse Meta of creating a racist AI, adding only that the AI displays indications of bias and leans into stereotypes. But others on social media went further and branded the AI tool as explicitly racist.
Meta is not the first major tech company to be accused of creating a racist AI image generator. In February, Google was forced to pause its Gemini AI tool after it was criticised for seemingly refusing to generate images of white people.
The AI would create images of Asian Nazis and Black Vikings when provided with race-neutral requests. In a statement, Google admitted it had ‘missed the mark here’.