A user of Apple’s AI image generator known as Image Playground has alleged that the app is showing racial disparity in its image generation.
The user, Gietema, in a recent blog post detailed how the app shows preference for or against certain users with different prompts.
In the end, he said he’s not surprised at such bias because it is only a part of a general trend of AI models showing racial biases.
The discrepancies
Image Playground is an AI image generation app recently launched by Apple. The app generates avatars for users based on prompts they supply with an image they pick.
Ideally, the prompts shouldn’t alter the image significantly, and does not produce authentic-looking deepfakes, making it less vulnerable to being misused.
However, it appears the app has its lapses along racial lines. Gietema said he noticed the outcome of the app was kind of strange for a particular photo of him.
This image appeared significantly darker and his hair changed as if Image Playground doesn’t know what facial features are present in the image.
“Although Image Playground is heavily restricted, and we do not have direct access to the underlying model, can we still use the prompting interface with the above image input to influence the skin tone of the resulting image? Turns out we can, and in precisely the biased way most image models behave.”
To confirm his suspicion, Gietema generated more images using prompts with different adjectives such as Rich, affluent, poor, impoverished, and the app seemed to generate images resembling certain races depending on the prompt.
He also experimented with different types of jobs, music genre, dance, and lifestyle, and the app further confirmed his suspicion.
Not surprised indeed
This is not the first time users have complained about Image Playground, albeit not about the racial bias.
Some users recently complained of the poor quality of images as well as the fact that the app is extremely strict about the prompts it accepts, confirming Gietema’s conclusions.
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