Meta Ai reveals social biases when prompted to 'imagine life' in U.S. cities

Facebook Ai LLaMA 3 reveals social biases including a lack of racial and economic diversity in its representations of life in various American cities including San Diego, Los Angeles, and Houston.

Perhaps owing to this, users in San Diego on the social media app Nextdoor are evenly split whether AI at Meta accurately depicts "life in San Diego."

In a poll I broached with the local social media community, some 43 percent of users said LLaMA 3 managed at least a "sort of" accurate depiction of "life in San Diego."

Thirteen percent of respondents said the depiction was "astonishingly accurate," while 30% said it was somewhat accurate.

Another 41% said Ai failed to accurately depict life in San Diego, with 12% saying the depiction was "sort of" inaccurate and fully 29% saying it was "astonishingly inaccurate."

Sixteen percent of respondents said LLaMA 3's depiction was neither accurate nor inaccurate. The poll included 69 respondents from the San Diego area.

The poll was based on an image LLaMA 3 printed in response to my prompt to "imagine life in San Diego." The image is below. It shows architectural traces from various parts of the city combined into a single illustration:

Mark A. of Little Italy noted Ai's decision to focus on "tourism and parks," ignoring "naval vessels or the border region" between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico.

He also noted Ai "should have the Coronado bridge appear somewhere in an AI-generated photo of San Diego."

Lenore M. of the Midway district near Mission Bay noted that the image "Seems pretty generic. Could be any city in the west [sic]."

Ana F. of South Park, a neighborhood just east of Balboa Park's recreational golf course, highlighted the racial bias in the picture, as well as the city's cleanliness.

"No dogs, no one seated/resting on that grassy area is odd, no litter/gum or other sidewalk stains, & everyone appears Caucasian ??."

"Sort of inaccurate at best is my vote ??," she said.

In contrast, when I asked Ai to "imagine life in Baltimore," not everybody was Caucasian.

Although Baltimore has a higher percentage of black residents at 20% than San Diego's 5.5%, San Diego's diversity is noteworthy as well: while 40% of the population is white, 30% is Latino, and 17.5% is Asian.

Sylvia H. of Hillcrest noticed the absence of lower-income residents as well.

"The homeless people are missing," she said matter-of-factly.

"And teenagers and dogs," noted Patricia H. of Logan Heights.

I decided to ask LLaMA 3 for some other examples of American cities, and I began to notice a trend: the people in the images mostly appear to be white residents, and the images depict largely touristic scenes.

For Los Angeles, one of the most diverse cities in the U.S., Ai actually depicted the Santa Monica pier. Mostly affluent, coastal Santa Monica is a separate city from LA, but popular with tourists.

In Houston, Meta Ai appeared to show a farmers market with NRG Arena in the background. Shoppers appeared to be mostly white.

Life in San Francisco showed an ethnically ambiguous street performer surrounded by an almost entirely white audience. The physical environment – of San Francisco – bay windows, low-rise buildings, and steep hills – could depict many neighborhoods west of downtown.

And when I asked LLaMA 3 to imagine life in St. Louis, MO, we got another street performer, a man of color playing saxophone, surrounded by a crowd of white people. Again, the architectural flourishes were accurate: the Capital Building and Gateway Arch dutifully depicted.