An Asian MIT student asked AI to turn an image of her into a professional headshot. It made her white with lighter skin and blue eyes.::Rona Wang, a 24-year-old MIT student, was experimenting with the AI image creator Playground AI to create a professional LinkedIn photo.
This issue here is business insiders baiting article.
I assume the MIT student knows the limitations of the technology and probably could have avoided the issue by inputting more criteria for their request to the image processor.
It is known that these image producing systems utilize aggregated data from skewed sources. We surely need to expand the variety of datasets these systems have access to, but we also need to more effectively teach people how to use them to get what they actually want from the system.
The article didn’t tell us the exact prompt that was given to the system. I’m sure it was extremely basically and that is why it yielded an image in line with its average image of “professional”. If the MIT student has added in the prompt “asian” it probably would have done what they wanted. Again I’m sure the student knows that and the article just picked this up to bait people for clicks.