SoFi creates images like this to combat stereotypes about women and money. AI-generated images, provided by SoFi
If you ask an AI tool to generate images of wealthy people, successful investors, or people who make smart financial decisions, the person you see in the AI-generated image is a woman.
SoFi, a personal finance company, tested this theory using four top AI tools. Of the thousands of images of wealthy people generated, less than 2% of her were female.
“Women continue to be economically superior, and despite the clear data and statistics to support this, our society, and the artificial intelligence that mirrors our society, still does not recognize this. No,” said Lauren Stafford-Webb, chief marketing officer at SoFi. , Said luck.
To combat this AI bias, SoFi is wielding the power of a photo booth.
Last week, the company set up a pop-up photo booth in New York City’s Brookfield Place for several days. The women in the photo booth took snapshots, which were superimposed against a backdrop of dollar bills.
Attendees who post pictures of themselves on social media from the photobooth will be entered into a drawing to win two tickets to Taylor Swift’s concert at SoFi Stadium when she hits Ellas Tour of California venues in August. be done.
But money-filled photos have another destination and mission beyond social feeds. According to SoFi, when a photo of someone is taken, the photo is fed back to the AI model and used to retrain the model. The photobooth is part of the company’s “Face of Finance” campaign, which it claims is an effort to set the facts straight by changing false stereotypes about women and their finances.
“Women already control $10 trillion in the United States and will have $30 trillion by 2030,” Webb said. “Ultimately correcting misconceptions about how women handle money will help more women spend money the right way.”
The problem of AI bias is not limited to women and money topics. Female-like voice assistants like Siri have been shown to reinforce the idea that women are submissive, and facial recognition technology has been shown to misidentify women, especially women of color, at a higher rate than other subjects. I’m here.
But the rise of text-to-image AI tools from companies like OpenAI, Midjourney, and Stability AI has brought this problem to the surface. OpenAI acknowledged that its DALL-E 2 image generator “exhibited more gender and racial prejudice” than similar models created by the company for non-commercial purposes. And as AI company Hugging Face explained in his Stable Diffusion Bias Explorer, large language models that power generative AI often produce results that match typecasting.
Hundreds of women used the photo booth during the two days of the pop-up, according to SoFi. According to SoFi, the photos are being put back into her AI models to create a more equal representation of women in the financial industry, though the company has not disclosed which AI models are being retrained.
Prior to entering the photo booth, participants will be presented with a disclaimer explaining how their photos will be used.
The ethics of obtaining consent for AI tools to use people’s ideas, words, art styles, and likenesses are hotly debated. In February, Getty Images sued Stability AI for copyright infringement, alleging that the company copied 12 million images without a legal basis for using them to train AI models. And in recent years, states like Virginia, Texas, and California have enacted deepfake laws.
And just this month, a new season of Netflix’s sci-fi anthology series began. black mirror explored potential problems that can arise from allowing companies to use people’s digital likenesses in a disturbing episode titled “Joan Is Awful.”
SoFi said the images generated from its photobooth were inspired by real women, but did not use portraits of real women. SoFi has teamed up with OutSnapped, a vendor that offers virtual and AI photo booths that let you adjust photos, add backgrounds, overlays, props, and blend images and graphics in a process called “synthography.” doing.
