Gen AI Meets A Woman in Tech

It’s been a pleasure designing my own webpage and boy! has it been a learning experience.

Not just on how to design a personal branding website, but also on what content to showcase about yourself without putting too much out there, that can be misused by bad players.

One of the main items in designing the website was graphics. Some places I was able to use my personal images, in some from the canned image section provided by the website builder but in some places, I wanted to have something unique that resonated with the topic, and I used the Image Generator app provided by the website builder. The Image Generator, based on the popular generative AI technology, is an amazing add, as it helps create unique graphics for the website. However, what was a bit surprising to me was the limited, unexpected set of images it creates for women in technology.

Let me give you a few examples on why I say that.

1) I wanted to generate an image for a woman in technology, so I gave the prompt and to my surprise only blonde women in variety of work settings showed up. So, I changed the prompt to include “woman in technology with short black hair” , for this prompt mostly oriental Asians or African American women, with glasses and hand folded showed up. After several regenerations none of the outcomes was something, I related to as a brown skin, woman engineer with black hair. So, I gave up and used something of my own.

2) In a section for my website, I was writing about my passion for karate and advocating for more women in STEM carriers and the concept of breaking the glass ceiling. So, I decided to use the help of Image generator to create something fun combining my two passions together and this time instead of real picture, I decided to go with animation, hoping I will see more creativity. I started with the prompt “woman engineer with short black hair, breaking the glass ceiling with a karate kick”. Oh! my! was I surprised with the resultant images. After many iterations, every single time a version of a very Japanese anime like female character with cleavage showing in different attires showed up, which I found disturbingly shocking. Reason for the shock being, why does the generated female character need to have inappropriate showing of certain body areas every single time. And the other surprise to me was that many images there were generated has unexpected extra limbs, instead of a foot for kick, hand was the extension of the leg. After several iterations and the guilt of leaving a significant carbon footprint to unsuccessful generation of a creative image, I gave up and used the prompt to generate something completely different but simple (woman walking towards sunrise, to which I had to add woman with black hair, else all images generated were for blonde hair !).

These are just a few examples, and my point is not that Gen AI or Image Generators are bad. I use a variety of GenAI tools every day for coding, debugging to summarization, to content creation and they are amazing at many things. But my point is that these tools like all AI tools are as good as the data they are trained on, and they are still far from being perfect. For me the lack of diversity of data on “woman in technology” stood out and the onus is not on the tool developer or the tool but on all of us, because most of these tools are trained on open, public data and most of that data is limited to a certain demographic or a certain population portrayed by a narrow lens. So, it’s upon each one of us to make sure we contribute/improve the open, diverse data set so these AI tools, which will become more pervasive and part of our daily lives can learn from the diverse data and respond in a way that a larger population can connect with.