If they just changed the sweatshirt from GAP to Stanford nobody would’ve noticed or cared.
Changing the guy into a back girl? WTF? Why‽ There’s no purpose or point. Unless the editor hated that guy or something?
Appearance, vanity, misapprehension of what “diversity” means or willfully trying to misrepresent reality…take your pick.
Body shaming the girl on the left makes it obvious this wasn’t because of the Gap logo.
What a strange, pointless thing to do
Too lazy to ask a Black lady student to pose for a picture, just have the slop machine take a crack at it.
That’s just such a grim concept to me. ‘we need to show that we have diversity… by manufacturing a completely fake person. And while we’re at it, make the others more attractive.’ Just ew
The problem with AI for Photoshop style stuff like this is not really in the outcome but in the ease of use and how easily it can result in something like this. We’ve had the ability to do stuff like this for as long as digital photos have existed. The problem is that in the process of deciding to have an edit done like this you’d at least have to go through another person with the skill. The person deciding on final photos is likely not even involved in the photography, the editing, printing, etc. In the past to do an edit like this you’d have to do it intentionally.
Now, you could literally have a single person tasks with “cleaning up the photos” and they generate some AI edits of a photo suggesting “college campus photo”. The AI is trained on millions of photos with campus website data and those photos have desperately been of photos capturing a white guy with two other non white people.
So, we get this shit. And someone that could be completely unaware of the edit and removal of a real person ends up picking the photo with the “most diversity”. My best faith interpretation is that at least.
But the weight loss of the person on the left is screaming to me that someone just used AI to generate edits and the AI literally just decided “there should be a black woman here” because we’ve trained it to assume that black woman should be in campus photos.
Ironically, it’s kind of AI just exposing our bias to compensate for real material problems (under representation of black woman in higher education due to systemic racism and sexism) by centering our photos around denying that material reality.
Our marketing professor made these slop fliers for a food truck he was endorsing for his class to attend, and it replaced the diverse workers with frat guys, fucked the contact information on the truck, replaced the menus with “it’s yummy” and “a great day” signage instead… all kinds of utter trash, and the FUCKED thing is… the source photo was right there. He could’ve fucking copy-pasted but that was too much work somehow.
He’s likely being told to show how he’s using AI in his classroom. The Administration and school that are telling him that are being told to encourage the use of AI in the classroom. The college is being told to incorporate AI in the classroom by donors and the institutions of private and public sectors that depend on capital investors. The capital investors are heavily leveraged into AI in their portfolio and using their other existing capital investments to push AI use in everything they can.
It’s the same reason we got “smart toasters” with a touchscreen and wifi. Any reason or rational that a college professor once had is being overshadowed by these structures. It’s a disease in our society that has existed long before AI.
AI just exposes it so perfectly and so ridiculously. In the past. You could convince someone why they might want their toaster connected to WiFi. It’s ridiculous, but it’s within a realm of reality. AI exposes the lies of incentives of capitalism so clearly. “This image is garbage and not even in a human way. It’s not a poorly drawn or contains a common misspelling. It’s literally hitting some internal feeling of anxiety when I look at it. That feeling of creepy, inhuman uncanny valley. And it will never go away”.
Nope, this is alllllll him. He’s even walking around violating FERPA by using pervert glasses during class and school events. We’re a largely anti-AI faculty and outside of one blackboard IT person, it’s similar through much of admin.
They must be so proud of their students. /s
