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There was an episode of Scrubs where Turk (Black Male Doctor) is annoyed about always being used in advertisements for everything he was in. They had a gag where his college had him copy and pasted twice in the same picture of an advertisement.
I was looking at a marketing page for a conference I attended. This conference had hundreds of mostly white people. But out of 10 photos of individuals or small groups, 7 centered a non-white person. I was there twice (same photo). I'd like to think I'm just photogenic--but I look like Azis Ansari with better facial hair, lol.
Worked on a university web team years ago and the Scrubs gag is barely an exaggeration. We got asked to swap heads and recolor a crowd shot for a brochure once. The AI version just does it in seconds instead of a designer sighing for an afternoon.
At my old job, there was one black guy in the entire department. Every promotional photo, external or internal, had the same 10 year old photo of him posing for the camera.
Yes, which is why people study marketing to understand revealed preferences in society. Here, they slimmed down the woman on the left. It's well known that skinnier is more marketable. By the same token, we must assume that they think replacing the hispanic man with a black woman is also an upgrade. By contrast, in China, they sometimes do the opposite: https://variety.com/2015/film/news/star-wars-china-poster-co....
But for the dining hall presummably you dont just want skinny people, because that probably just means lame salads and stuff. Its like if the chef is too skinny, i suspect that.
If i were to do the dining hall ads I'd make everybody super fat. Look how delicious our food is!
Hey buddy, not everything is about cold calculation. Some of us value culture and integrity. These are going to matter even more in the age of AI not less.
same here, being removed would be for me less worrying than someone finding me ugly and changing my face to meet their beauty standards, especially considering they are doing it to girl, for the boy it is not that extreme, you can still recognize him
Really seems like they used it to anonymize the students, but that is a lot less polarizing. Does it matter if they swapped the race? They also swapped all identifying facial features of anyone in the picture. That might have even been the prompt they used in the first place.
I am not a big fan of gen ai, but freak outs about nothingness detract from the real issues. I would be more concerned if they swapped the 3 students into a background or setting they were never in, than use the public setting and swap out the students for ai models.
Edit: please stop saying I didn't read the article. The article is almost exclusively opinion based on the observers reaction. "Slimmed down" is what I an saying is anonymized. As I also said, they put letting on top, so it is a tiny tile in a much larger piece. No problem if people don't agree, but the contention the article gives a lot of info and supporting claims is not true. We only really learn Stanford took the photo from the article, the rest of the conclusions are drawn from the 2 pics
That explanation doesn't make sense. If the point is anonymity, why not just AI generate the students entirely? They AI-generated the girl on the right in her entirety, so capability clearly isn't the problem. And the guy in the middle is still very much recognizable.
I don't understand what you mean? For me, it appears all 3 students have been changed. The 3rd student is changed into a black female. I am not doubting they want to inject diversity (although i didnt say it above) my contention is they likely view the original as a blank background, which they inserted 3 "new" anonymized students into. Its not that they turned 1 person "black", its that they changed ALL 3 PEOPLE entirely
The change of the peoples faces might just be an artifact of nano banana regenerating the image.
I have done similar things and it sometimes changes the apperance of the people in the image. They might have also wanted to change the pullover of the guy wearing GAP.
And honestly targetgroup research should have happened before the photograph was taken. Not in post... but hey that was the big promise of genrative models right?
The thing is, the marketing department could have posed in their office holding staplers and notepads and then asked the model to recreate the image as well. to even save the cost for the photographer...
I'm not sure which is worse: human marketer instructing AI specifically to make everyone more diverse and attractive or human marketer instructing AI to do basic marketing and AI has internalized to make everyone more diverse and attractive.
I disagree that the second case is some mystery. Stock photography has cast people this way for fifteen years, and that's what these models trained on. The AI isn't internalizing an agenda, it's averaging ads. Either way a human approved the output and hit publish.
Yeah honestly anyone familiar with marketing and communications departments (and especially those in higher-ed) is used to this sort of chicanery.
This particular instance is somewhat notable in just how egregious it is, but they pick-and-choose students based solely on ethnicity for photoshoots all the time.
Small nit: picking students by ethnicity for a shoot is casting, not really chicanery, and people have known about it for decades. Editing a real student's race after the fact is the new part. Though I'll concede the old way was never exactly honest either.
I think if they did that, it would be a lot less of an issue. Here they took a genuine photo and made it fake. It's not representative at all, and it stinks of tokenism which I hate.
Either way, somebody signed off on that image before it shipped. Nobody reviews the output of these pipelines until it's already on a banner. Same as any unreviewed deploy: you find out from the angry email, not from a test.
Tokenism is awful. Unfortunately, speaking out about it is also frowned upon nowadays. To be perfectly clear, I'm only talking about marketing efforts that intentionally ignore or replace unmarked groups with marked ones. Here, they took a real photo and fucking replaced students that didn't look diverse enough for their tastes. I'd argue that should be considered just as bad as the reverse.
To downvoters: I AM NOT saying there should be less diversity. I am saying that fake and dishonest diversity is just as harmful as any other kind of discrimination. Instead of helping the problem it just creates an alternate version.
To quote one of the most prolifically insufferable linkposters of HN: "Demographics are destiny."
So, you fill your university marketing and publication department with people who think this is ok and this is the sort of PR faux-pas whoopsie you eventually get.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that this sort of marketing material needs as many races represented as possible so as many people as possible can at a glance see someone that looks like them and identify with it but something tells me the university isn't gonna come out and own it like that and even then using AI to make a replacement when you have a student body to pull from is kind of icky.
> I'm sympathetic to the argument that this sort of marketing material needs as many races represented as possible so as many people as possible can see it and see someone that looks like them and identify
It's regressive to want someone to look like you in order to identify with them. And universities like Stanford should be fighting that regressive instinct, not indulging it.
The consequences of not doing so will get ugly. My kids go to a "diverse" private school (but not economically or politically, obviously) and the message the kids get is that white people must reject special affinity for their co-ethnics, while that's acceptable or even encouraged for non-white people. There's a special "black girl magic" weekly lunch, which my daughter was invited to attend once a month because I guess that's how the math works for a half-white, half-asian girl. There is, of course, no affinity group for white (or British or whatever) kids. I think this double standard has only a decade or two before it collapses completely, and the result will be ugly.
I think the student is making a mountain out of a molehill. They didn’t “transform him into a studentin” they just replaced him with a female student in the position he was in the original photo.
Sure, it’s stupid to be so lazy that you can’t use a new photo with whatever characteristics you want. It’s also stupid to slim down a chubby student without permission. I think she has more reason to be upset than he has. That said why does the university see the need to alter reality?
We ran a small company and a real photo shoot cost us about $2k a day, so I get why people cut corners. But a university has thousands of real students and a photographer on payroll. No excuse here, and these things always get caught.
Self-inflicted by whom? I really don't think the people in the photo are the problem. I think whoever thought they needed to fucking edit it to create a fake impression of diversity needs to stop. If you want to show that your school has diverse students... then take diverse photos. Don't take a non-diverse photo and then diversify it. At best (there are diverse students, but they weren't in the photo) it's dishonest, at worst (there aren't diverse students) it's literally false advertising.
