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Gender Bias in Text-to-Image Generative Artificial Intelligence When Representing Cardiologists
www.mdpi.comIntroduction: While the global medical graduate and student population is approximately 50% female, only 13–15% of cardiologists and 20–27% of training fellows in cardiology are female. The potentially transformative use of text-to-image generative artificial intelligence (AI) could improve promotions and professional perceptions. In particular, DALL-E 3 offers a useful tool for promotion and education, but it could reinforce gender and ethnicity biases. Method: Responding to pre-specified prompts, DALL-E 3 via GPT-4 generated a series of individual and group images of cardiologists. Overall, 44 images were produced, including 32 images that contained individual characters and 12 group images that contained between 7 and 17 characters. All images were independently analysed by three reviewers for the characters’ apparent genders, ages, and skin tones. Results: Among all images combined, 86% (N = 123) of cardiologists were depicted as male. A light skin tone was observed in 93% (N = 133) of cardiologists. The gender distribution was not statistically different from that of actual Australian workforce data (p = 0.7342), but this represents a DALL-E 3 gender bias and the under-representation of females in the cardiology workforce. Conclusions: Gender bias associated with text-to-image generative AI when using DALL-E 3 among cardiologists limits its usefulness for promotion and education in addressing the workforce gender disparities.
Exactly. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to wish to bias learning to certain changes in output.
There are no legitimate reasons to do so without acknowledging that you are adding bias and being clear on the intent of doing so.
And even in cases where introducing a bias is desirable, you have to be very careful when doing it. There has been at least one case where introducing a bias towards diversity has caused problems when the algorithm is asked for images of historical people, who were often not diverse at all.