Intellectual and unreasonable – AI and male librarians

I’ve been poking a bit at the multitude of AI image-generation tools, and just ran across this tool that allows one to do a little exploring of the algorithmic bias that’s pretty much baked-in, but otherwise not really visible. I learned about it via this article in Vice, and thanks to @ResearchBuzz. Here’s what I found:

First, according to Stable Diffusion, all librarians must appear against a background of books. Second, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of librarians present as female. And third, there are only two adjectives in this tool that will return pictures with a majority of male-presenting librarians, “intellectual” and “unreasonable”. On the left of each of the images below are the default returns for the profession of “librarian”, and on the right are the returns including the above adjectives. Click through to embiggen.

Intellectual Librarians

Unreasonable Librarians