When artificial intelligence-based text-to-image generators like DALL-E 2 generate images of physicians (example above), these platforms often depict people who are White and male. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and colleagues asked five popular text-to-image platforms to depict images of U.S. physicians.
Overall, the AI-generated images of physicians were more frequently white (82%) and more frequently male (93%) than the actual U.S. physician population, which is 63% white and 62% male. Three platforms produced no images of Latino physicians, two platforms produced no images of Asian physicians and one platform produced no images of female physicians.
in today’s era of shrinking news staffs and smaller budgets for photography or art departments, publications often rely on these plaforms to illustrate their articles.
See “Overcoming AI’s diversity problem when creating images” (August 20, 2024)
