Bias bots, colourful stories, and iPhone prosthetics

AI-image gener-haters

If you caught last month’s Digestive, you might remember a section on Gemini – an AI-powered photo app with a body phobia. Well, we’re back with more biases, as it seems body shaming is just the tip of the AI-generated iceberg.

This new video essay from the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) casts a damning light on platforms like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion for producing portraits that perpetuate harmful biases across gender, race, age and skin.

Leonardo Nicoletti and Dina Bass at Bloomberg were the minds behind the study. They prompted Stable Diffusion to generate 5,000 portraits of people in different professions. And their analysis showed the results were awash with harmful stereotypes.

For example, when asked to generate images of people in higher paid jobs like CEOs, lawyers and politicians, the images were heavily swayed to lighter skin tones.

Whereas with low income jobs like dishwashers, caretakers, and fast food workers, the platform chose people with darker skin tones. The same was true with gender. Doctors and engineers featured many more men, and social workers and housekeepers featured many more women.

The biases were even stronger than the actual data in the US Bureau of Labor statistics. For example, women make up 39% of doctors in the US, but they were only represented in 7% of the images.

But the bots aren’t all to blame. The data sets they work off have been engineered by humans, and we’ve been feeding them with our conscious and unconscious biases ever since the dawn of the internet.

However, if we let them run like this, they’ll just keep feeding back into a vicious loop of prejudice and reaffirm those stereotypes society’s trying to shake off. So how do we change the tide? How do we interfere with the data to make things more equal?

Well, we’re sorry to say there’s no easy answer. Just more questions. And it’s not something that government regulations are going to solve in a hurry either. Check out the full video to see why.

Bloomberg has brought all the results to life on this fantastic site too, making all those disparities clear as day.

These colours have got a colourful past

It’s a running joke at Free that our designers are glorified ‘colour-inners’. Of course, we know they’re much, much more than that, but there’s nothing like a gentle office ribbing to keep everyone’s feet on the ground.

Jokes aside, even our head colour-inners haven’t heard of these different hues. Let alone the back stories behind them. Take Bastard-Amber – an amber-coloured spotlight that theatres use to recreate sunlight.

Drunk-Tank Pink – also called Baker-Miller pink, after the two US Navy officers who invented it. This shade of pink is said to have a calming influence – it’s often used in police holding cells to soothe unruly law breakers.

And Puke – nope, it’s not associated with vomit. Quite the opposite. In the 1500s, people who made gowns and stockings would use a fancy wool cloth called puke to make them. So they decided to use the word to describe the colour the items were dyed in. Scholar Thomas Elyot described puke as being somewhere “between russet & black”.

There are 36 other bizarrely-named colours for you to wade through here. Go have a flick through.

If I said your camera could do this, you’d say I was barking

Our dog-loving studio’s a sucker for canine content, so we leave you this month with Apple’s latest campaign ‘The Invincibles’ that ran at the end of August to mark International Dog Day.

It’s pretty hard for phones nowadays to find a new feature to hang their hat on, but if any company can do it, Apple can.

The short film follows Trip, a tripod rescue dog, on his journey to getting fitted with a prosthetic limb. Not only does the iPhone 14 shoot the entire ad, but it’s also used to help scan and build Trip’s custom prostheses. We doubt even Jobs saw that innovation coming.

It's both a heart warmer and a ‘Think different’ throwback. Watch the full ad here.

Let’s talk

2024 is coming up thick and fast. Want to make a splash with your insurance brand next year? Let’s talk about a campaign. Email the Free team at?[email protected]