Disability Representations: Finding Biases in Automatic Image Generation

AI governance and ethics in AI development have become critical concerns, prompting active discussions among tech companies, governments, and researchers about the potential risks AI poses to our democracies. This short essay aims to highlight one such risk: how generative AI includes or excludes equity-deserving groups in its outputs. The findings reveal that generative AI is not equitably inclusive regarding gender, race, age, and visible disability.

Generative artificial intelligence models show an amazing performance creating unique content automatically just by being given a prompt by the user, which is revolutionizing several fields such as marketing and design. Not only are there models whose generated output belongs to the text format but we also find models that are able to automatically generate high quality genuine images and videos given a prompt. Although the performance in image creation seems impressive, it i...

Language models (LM) are becoming prevalent in many language-based application spaces globally. Although these LMs are improving our day-to-day interactions with digital products, concerns remain whether open-ended languages or text generated from these models reveal any biases toward a specific group of people, thereby risking the usability of a certain product. There is a need to identify whether these models possess bias to improve the fairness in these models. This gap mo...

This paper examines the limitations of advanced text-to-image models in accurately rendering unconventional concepts which are scarcely represented or absent in their training datasets. We identify how these limitations not only confine the creative potential of these models but also pose risks of reinforcing stereotypes. To address these challenges, we introduce the Inpaint Biases framework, which employs user-defined masks and inpainting techniques to enhance the accuracy o...

Advances in generative models have led to significant interest in image synthesis, demonstrating the ability to generate high-quality images for a diverse range of text prompts. Despite this progress, most studies ignore the presence of bias. In this paper, we examine several text-to-image models not only by qualitatively assessing their performance in generating accurate images of human faces, groups, and specified numbers of objects but also by presenting a social bias anal...

This study analyzed images generated by three popular generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools - Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALLE 2 - representing various occupations to investigate potential bias in AI generators. Our analysis revealed two overarching areas of concern in these AI generators, including (1) systematic gender and racial biases, and (2) subtle biases in facial expressions and appearances. Firstly, we found that all three AI generators exhibited bias ...

Text-to-Image generative systems are progressing rapidly to be a source of advertisement and media and could soon serve as image searches or artists. However, there is a significant concern about the representativity bias these models embody and how these biases can propagate in the social fabric after fine-tuning them. Therefore, continuously monitoring and evaluating these models for fairness is important. To address this issue, we propose Text-to-Image (TTI) Representativi...

Text-to-Image (T2I) generation is enabling new applications that support creators, designers, and general end users of productivity software by generating illustrative content with high photorealism starting from a given descriptive text as a prompt. Such models are however trained on massive amounts of web data, which surfaces the peril of potential harmful biases that may leak in the generation process itself. In this paper, we take a multi-dimensional approach to studying ...

With the recent rapid rise in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) tools, it is imperative that we understand their impact on people with disabilities, both positive and negative. However, although we know that AI in general poses both risks and opportunities for people with disabilities, little is known specifically about GAI in particular. To address this, we conducted a three-month autoethnography of our use of GAI to meet personal and professional needs as a team of r...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, especially generative AI technologies are becoming more relevant in our society. Tools like ChatGPT are being used by members of the disabled community e.g., Autistic people may use it to help compose emails. The growing impact and popularity of generative AI tools have prompted us to examine their relevance within the disabled community. The design and development phases often neglect this marginalized group, leading to inaccurate predic...