Fake Pictures of People of Color Won't Fix AI Bias

Armed with a belief in technology's generative potential, a growing faction of researchers and companies aims to solve the problem of bias in AI by creating artificial images of people of color. Proponents argue that AI-powered generators can rectify the diversity gaps in existing image databases by supplementing them with synthetic images. Some researchers are using machine learning architectures to map existing photos of people onto new races in order to "balance the ethnic distribution" of datasets. Others, like Generated Media and Qoves Lab, are using similar technologies to create entirely new portraits for their image banks, "building … faces of every race and ethnicity," as Qoves Lab puts it, to ensure a "truly fair facial dataset." As they see it, these tools will resolve data biases by cheaply and efficiently producing diverse images on command.