Midjourney — Can AI be inherently sexist, or is it humans that made it such?
It is a hard work to be a woman. The notion of looks, aging, and the correlating drop off in the supposed “value” as the latter ramps up and the former diminishes, is routinely used to bring a perfectly happy and content female down a notch every step of the way. With the introduction of AI, we are taking this concept further. Even robots seem to take a jab at womanhood which only further propels the message that looks are everything while aging is a catastrophe.
Midjourney.
I’ve been following the AI hype for months until I finally signed for Midjourney a few weeks ago. The prospect of instantly making royalty-free and free images sounded exhilarating. I was immediately enamored with the perfectly crisp quality and the sleek look & feel of the images. The platform’s ability to generate an illustration based off the reference image or make a “high quality high detail photograph in 4K”, a “graphic startup logo”, or even the entire “design mockup of a fitness app” seemed miraculous. It was entertaining to see one of my prompts being adopted and developed by other Discord users, as well as getting educated and inspired by the way others used the platform to build their own queries. The creative riff off was fun.
User-generated images were piped into a group chat 24/7. After a while I started noticing a certain uniformity of queries that seemed to dominate the Midjourney user base.
Most queries asked to make an image of an attractive female <enter race, hair and eye color, maybe a description of a luxury vehicle where she was to be to seated in a seductive and elegant pose> Like in a toy store for grown ups, users were custom building their own version of an ultimate fantasy Barbie. As a result the platform was overcrowded with the requests for the glamorous model images of beautiful women that the creators could look at, admire, or even daydream of dating one day, like in Shaw’s Pygmalion.
Fascinated by this observation I stopped wasting my allocated jobs to generate versions of Black Bombay Cat Bounty Hunter image modeled after my cat, and tried something different.
I asked the engine to make a high detail high quality image of an average looking female.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Midjourney, the query always starts as
/imagine Once the user inputs the prompt, the AI will generate a set of four images, which can be further scaled to a higher resolution or have additional variations generated.
When I asked for an image of an average-looking woman, the AI generated four images of older women with wrinkles and eye bags. Clearly, the AI’s assumption was that an average-looking woman must be older and have visible signs of aging.
This observation poses a question of whether AI has already learnt inherent sexism, or if it is a product of human influence and design. How come the innovative algorithm that mixes and matches images from public space to produce something uniquely new only reinforced the old idea?
If the world thought I was ugly at 16, overweight at 21, unskilled at 28 and lacking in leadership ability at 34, is it truly surprising news that it thinks I’m old at 37? From adolescence, women are being taught that they are somehow lacking. Playing up our age is yet another powerful tool to make us feel insecure about our looks at the expense of using our talents and skills to get further in life. Whether it is for the profit of the beauty industry or to remove us from the societal equation entirely, it works. Sadly, many women end up internalizing this message, and even pioneering it in the narrative of their own lives. They give up on themselves way before their expiration date and way before their friends and loved ones do.
As I was nearly finished, I decided to plug my first draft of this story into ChatGPT to have it clean it up for me. I was surprised to see AI come back with the seemingly perfect last paragraph.
It is important to recognize the harmful effects that societal pressures and unrealistic expectations can have on women. Women should not feel the need to conform to unrealistic standards set by society or AI-generated images. Instead, they should celebrate their unique qualities and embrace their individuality.
~ChatGPT
Amen to that.
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