Instagram encountered a brief disruption in its AI-generated images of individuals with Asian features. Users attempting to utilize the tool encountered temporary errors during this time, shedding light on potential issues within Instagram's AI technology and its ability to accurately represent diverse racial features.
According to Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, the platform will now allow everyone to download public Reels. Before, you can only save it within the app. (Photo : Alexander Shatov from Unsplash)
Unveiling Racial Biases
Instagram experienced a disruption in its AI-generated images of individuals with Asian features. Following a report highlighting anomalies in Instagram's AI image generation pertaining to racial representation, users encountered temporary errors when attempting to access the tool.
The Verge observed that the AI image generator initially exhibited a tendency to depict individuals as Asian, regardless of the specified race in the text prompts. However, today presented an unexpected reversal: attempts to generate images of Asian individuals using identical prompts from the previous day proved unsuccessful.
Multiple tests were conducted to ascertain the accuracy of the generated images. Despite numerous attempts with prompts such as "Asian man and Caucasian friend" and "Asian man and white wife," the system consistently failed to produce a single accurate image.
Remarkably, only one instance succeeded in generating a picture depicting an Asian woman and a white man, underscoring the pervasive tendency to render individuals as Asian across various prompts.
Today, an attempt was made to determine if the issue had been resolved or if the AI system still struggled to accurately depict an Asian person with their white friend. Instead of encountering a series of racially inaccurate images, an error message appeared, stating, "Looks like something went wrong. Please try again later or try a different prompt."
Some individuals encountered difficulties in generating artificial Asian personas. After attempting to generate various images, including broader prompts such as "Asian man in suit" and "Asian woman shopping," they consistently received error messages instead of images.
Frustrated by the recurring issue, they sought clarification from Meta's communications team. Despite their efforts, the problem persisted, preventing some from creating artificial Asian personas or generating images using prompts related to other ethnicities such as "Latino man in suit" and "African American man in suit."
Uncovering Bias in Meta's AI Image Generator
The inability of the image generator to depict Asian individuals alongside white individuals is concerning. However, beyond this blatant bias, there are subtler indications of partiality in the system's automatic outputs.
For instance, it was observed that Meta's tool consistently portrayed "Asian women" as having East Asian features and light skin tones, despite the fact that India has the highest population of any country.
Furthermore, the tool would add culturally specific clothing even without prompting. While it generated several images of older Asian men, the Asian women depicted were consistently portrayed as young.
Last year, Meta launched its AI image generator tools, which quickly encountered issues. The sticker creation tool, in particular, experienced misuse as users generated inappropriate content such as nude images and depictions of Nintendo characters holding guns.
This incident underscores the fact that AI systems often mirror the biases inherent in their creators, trainers, and the datasets they are trained on.
