Is ChatGPT racist?

Claire Baker
Jan 3
2 min read

I'm tired of explaining to ChatGPT that not every person in the world is white.

I create a lot of content.

I like to write, so no need for AI there. You can tell that the em-dashes are my own by all the typos and awkward sentence structures that surround them.

But most internet publishing still requires images.

A good image can make text come alive. A bad stock photo can make even the most engaging content read like a public health flyer.

I don't always have 45 minutes to create the perfect image that I'm picturing in my head. And I'm not about to pay $2.99 for a stock photo that's just slightly more evocative than the free stuff on Unsplashed.

So AI image generation has been a godsend.

But.

Every 👏 Single 👏 Person 👏 AI generates for me is caucasian.

What is AI for if not to override our implicit biases with random representation?

.gif culture has nailed representation.

Who among us hasn't found a .gif of someone who looks very different from us embodying the exact emotion that we're trying to convey.

When I —a 5-foot-tall white woman— send a .gif of Shaq wiggling with excitement, I am saying, "This man is the best representation of my inner world right now."

And no one has any trouble seeing that me and this seven-foot-tall bald man as the same.

If I ask AI to generate "an image of someone eating a sandwich on a park bench" 20 times, I want it to generate a mix of genders, races, ages, and lifestyles.

Not a white-bread-and-mayonnaise caucasian dude every time.

And yet... See for yourself.

Here are 15 images that AI created for me this holiday break.

All include the original prompt and the first image rendered.