Artificial Intelligence Is Racist. Can We Fix It?

Damien Lamar
3 min readJan 3, 2023

Why Everyone Who Cares About Tech Should Care About AI and Algorithms

It’s been a recent observation of mine where I found that biases in AI art renderings. By default, the program produces people who are not of color. If I want to see results that include black or African people, I’ll have to input “black” or “African” into the database myself.

When programmed by biased humans, artificial intelligence can produce results that are not only inaccurate but offensive as well. This image was created by me using Midjourney (version 4)

I went to ChatGPT to have AI generate its own opinion based on my observations and this is what it states (and it’s spot on):

“It is important to recognize that artificial intelligence (AI) systems, including those used for generating art, are not neutral and can reflect and amplify the biases present in the data they are trained on and the design choices made by their developers. This can have a significant impact on the output generated by these systems, including in the case of AI art.

For example, if an AI system is trained on a dataset that lacks diversity and is predominantly composed of images of white individuals, the system may be more likely to generate images of white individuals as its default output. This could result in a lack of representation and diversity in the generated art, which could perpetuate and amplify existing biases.

It is important to consider…

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Damien Lamar

Multipotentialite. 2/5 Pure Generator with Sacral Authority. Creative Director. ASCAP Writer/Publisher. Web & Music Producer. http://www.damienlamar.com