AI Image Generators Routinely Display Gender and Cultural Bias

If you grew up in a covered 12-foot hole in the Earth, and only had a laptop running the latest version of the Stable Diffusion AI image generator, then you would believe that there was no such thing as a woman engineer. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that women are massively underrepresented in the engineering field, but averages from 2018 show that women make up around a fifth of people in engineering professions. But if you use Stable Diffusion to display an "engineer" all of them are men. If Stable Diffusion matched reality, then out of nine images based on a prompt "engineer," 1.8 of those images should display women. Artificial intelligence researcher for Hugging Face, Sasha Luccioni, created a simple tool that offers perhaps the most effective way to show biases in the machine learning model that creates images. The Stable Diffusion Explorer shows what the AI image generator thinks is an "ambitious CEO" versus a "supportive CEO."