Race Matters While messing with an AI image generator, an Asian-American MIT grad found that the bot’s way of professionalizing her headshot was to make her… white. In an interview with Insider, 24-year-old Rona Wang said prompted the Playground AI image editor to make her headshot seem more “professional” — and instead, it lightened her skin and, well, basically changed her race. was trying to get a linkedin profile photo with AI editing & this is what it gave me pic.twitter.com/AZgWbhTs8Q — Rona Wang (@ronawang) July 14, 2023 CEO No Unsurprisingly, the post went viral, garnering a quick response from Playground AI’s CEO Suhail Doshi, and soon after, an interview with the Boston Globe about the debacle. Futurism and Insider both reached out to Playground for comment without response, though the CEO did respond to the Globe’s interview questions with a few rhetorical ones of his own. “If I roll a dice just once and get the number 1, does that mean I will always get the number 1?” Doshi quipped. Should I conclude based on a single observation that the dice is biased to the number 1 and was trained to be predisposed to rolling a 1?” Unbearable Whiteness Though Wang had been using AI image generators for some time — her commentary about it was even republished on MIT’s admissions blog just a few weeks before the Playground incident — this time seemed much more personal. “I was like, ‘Wow, does this thing think I should become white to become more professional?'” she…An Asian Woman Asked AI to Improve Her Headshot and It Turned Her White