Outrage as AI creates what 'average person' looks like in each US state
The things you can do with AI today are pretty scary.
But there's times when the software can only use its limited knowledge about a place to generate a representation, and sometimes it can be pretty offensive.
In recent years, people have really been pushing the boundaries of what this tech can offer, giving AI a prompt and seeing what weird and wonderful creations it can come up with.
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From famous cartoons come to life and alarmingly realistic food pictures that are good enough to fool your friends on Instagram, we've all had a good laugh at the marvels this technology can come up with. But when asked to create the 'average person' in certain American states, let's just say the results are less than flattering.
As we all know, there's no such thing as the 'average person' and we're all totally unique. But AI is able to play on stereotypes, fashion trends and local traditions to create images of what it believes to be the 'average' human from a certain area.
The artificially-generated series of images were first shared on Reddit on the thread r/midjourney along with the caption: "the most stereotypical person in [state name]."
First up we have North Carolina, and although I said there is no such thing as 'the average person', NC is about as non-descript and they come. I wonder how they feel about that.
Did we expect anything else from Texas than a guy wearing a big hat? Even for AI, this one is too on the nose. Of course, we see an image of a man dressed in 'cowboy'-style attire, including a large cowboy hat and a brown shirt. Next.
Florida is known for a lot of weird and wonderful things, if not slightly on the weirder side, but I think we'd know if there were human-shaped Gecko's wandering around in colourful shirts. According to AI, this is your average Floridian - yikes!
Unable to make a decision on what the average Californian looks like, AI decided to just choose nine women who all look vaguely similar - with not one imperfection (or bit of diversity) anywhere to be seen. At least they're women, because the rest of the states are only occupied by men - and Gecko's - it seems.
One average statesman that looks like he has seen better days is Illinois. I don't know what's been going down in the windy city, but someone get this man a drink - and quick.
Those who have seen the images have had mixed reviews, with one Reddit user claiming the original poster 'clearly used unflattering prompts for the red states'.
This isn't the first time AI generated folks have left us baffled, though. There's even been an AI recreation of film series Harry Potter that's supposedly made to look like its set in Poland.