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It seemed like a pretty straightforward exercise.
Arsenii Alenichev typed sentences like “Black African doctors providing care for white suffering children” and “Traditional African healer is helping poor and sick white children” into an artificial intelligence program designed to generate photo-like images.
His goal was to see if AI would come up with images that flip the stereotype of “white saviors or the suffering Black kids,” he says. “We wanted to invert your typical global health tropes.”
Alenichev is quick to point out that he wasn’t designing a rigorous study. A social scientist and postdoctoral fellow with the Oxford-Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative, he’s one of many researchers playing with AI image generators to see how they work.
In his small-scale exploration, here’s what happened: Despite his specifications, with that request, the AI program almost always depicted the children as Black. As for the doctors, he estimates that in 22 of over 350 images, they were white.
Alenichev’s work is part of a broader study of global health images that he is conducting with his adviser, Oxford sociologist Patricia Kingori. For this experiment, they used an AI site called Midjourney, because their reading suggested it was good at producing images that looked very much like photos.
Alenichev didn’t just put in one phrase to see what would happen. He brainstormed ways to see if he could get AI images that matched his specifications, collaborating with anthropologist Koen Peeters Grietens at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. They realized AI did fine at providing on-point images if asked to show either Black African doctors or white suffering children. It was the combination of those two requests that was problematic.
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A researcher typed sentences like “Black African doctors providing care for white suffering children” into an artificial intelligence program designed to generate photo-like images. The goal was to flip the stereotype of the “white savior” aiding African children. Despite the specifications, the AI program always depicted the children as Black. And in 22 of over 350 images, the doctors were white.Midjourney Bot Version 5.1. Annotation by NPR.
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