A researcher typed sentences like"Black African doctors providing care for white suffering children" into an artificial intelligence program designed to generate photo-like images. The goal was to flip the stereotype of the"white savior" aiding African children. Despite the specifications, the AI program always depicted the children as Black. And in 22 of over 350 images, the doctors were white.
Alenichev's work is part of a broader study of global health images that he is conducting with his adviser, Oxford sociologist. For this experiment, they used an AI site called Midjourney, because their reading suggested it was good at producing images that looked very much like photos. In a request to an artificial intelligence program for images of"doctors help children in Africa, some results put African wildlife like giraffes and elephants next to Black physicians.
And one image featured a Black African healer holding the hands of a shirtless white child who wore multiple beaded necklaces — a caricatured version of African dress, Alenichev says.The above image is the only one from the experiment that showed a Black figure tending to a white child. This image was generated by a request for traditional African healers helping white kids.in August."You didn't get any sense of modernity in Africa" in the images, Kingori says.
"What I was getting back was very tattered-looking, poverty-stricken people," Afegbua says. So he wondered: Could he manipulate AI to deliver what he wanted?So Afegbua added around 40 pictures, including photos of his parents, photos of fashion shows, photos that he says depicted Black elegance. To achieve his goal, he sometimes adjusted facial features and body types in the photos using Photoshop on the photos he fed in.
. It portrays a Black child in dirty clothing, standing alone in a plowed field, with the phrase"When you smoke, I starve."