Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising

Posted by docdeek 13 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c 12 hours ago

Throwback to when Microsoft swapped a black guy out for a white guy in an ad meant for Poland: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/aug/26/microsoft...

Comment by ecshafer 12 hours ago

There was an episode of Scrubs where Turk (Black Male Doctor) is annoyed about always being used in advertisements for everything he was in. They had a gag where his college had him copy and pasted twice in the same picture of an advertisement.

Comment by rayiner 12 hours ago

I was looking at a marketing page for a conference I attended. This conference had hundreds of mostly white people. But out of 10 photos of individuals or small groups, 7 centered a non-white person. I was there twice (same photo). I'd like to think I'm just photogenic--but I look like Azis Ansari with better facial hair, lol.

Comment by 10 hours ago

Comment by peri-cl 12 hours ago

Escalate this all the way up to the president of Stanford. Falsifying images is a disreputable act such a prestigious institution will not tolerate.

Comment by telotortium 12 hours ago

Have you seen who the previous president of Stanford was ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Tessier-Lavigne

Comment by rahimnathwani 9 hours ago

Life imitates art: https://theonion.com/black-guy-photoshopped-in-1819565862/

Comment by andsoitis 13 hours ago

Marketing is about attracting customers.

So the incentives are there to present the image you want to project to attract customers.

Comment by rayiner 12 hours ago

Yes, which is why people study marketing to understand revealed preferences in society. Here, they slimmed down the woman on the left. It's well known that skinnier is more marketable. By the same token, we must assume that they think replacing the hispanic man with a black woman is also an upgrade. By contrast, in China, they sometimes do the opposite: https://variety.com/2015/film/news/star-wars-china-poster-co....

Comment by a34729t 11 hours ago

But for the dining hall presummably you dont just want skinny people, because that probably just means lame salads and stuff. Its like if the chef is too skinny, i suspect that.

If i were to do the dining hall ads I'd make everybody super fat. Look how delicious our food is!

Comment by 12 hours ago

Comment by ReptileMan 12 hours ago

And which exactly customers will be enticed by the modified image?

Comment by 10xDev 12 hours ago

Hey buddy, not everything is about cold calculation. Some of us value culture and integrity. These are going to matter even more in the age of AI not less.

Comment by andsoitis 12 hours ago

Advertising is more about selling aspirations rather than reflect objective reality.

To wit: even the original photo was probably staged…

Comment by 10xDev 12 hours ago

Anything you do as a university / person reflects your values. This shows a lack of integrity.

Comment by andsoitis 12 hours ago

> This shows a lack of integrity.

Why?

Comment by cucumber3732842 10 hours ago

It's considered unethical for food marketers to use marketing photos that aren't of the actual product. Sure, it's a perfect example staged under perfect lighting with perfect presentation but when you see a Dorito on the bag it's a real Dorito.

Why are photos of people any different? There needs to be some grounding of the presentation to what you're actually selling.

(It's also illegal for food, but that's beside the point, you shouldn't get your moral compass from the law)

Comment by bot403 7 minutes ago

I'm not sure why you say this. It's well known food is often very staged, and inedible substitutes often used in advertisements.

Do you want an advertising picture of a puddle of melted ice cream under hot studio lights?

And why would it be illegal for food?

Comment by anon7000 10 hours ago

Isn’t it obvious? Integrity is about honesty. They showed a picture claiming the school is one way, but the picture was a fabrication. It’d be the same if they were staging food in the cafeteria for marketing, but that food isn’t available to students.

You can make what you have look as good as it can, and I’m sure everyone does that.

But AI fabrications are crossing the line to outright lies, which is by definition violating integrity.

Comment by repeekad 12 hours ago

Are you justifying replacing a real hispanic student with a fake black one for "culture and integrity"?..

If you were being sarcastic, it was not clear.

Comment by ecshafer 12 hours ago

10xDev is arguing the opposite, NOT replacing students for some cold calculated marketing, and being more authentic for culture and integrity.

Comment by 468854259853 13 hours ago

So Stanford R&DE subscribes to the Jason Arday school of thought.

Comment by wand3r 13 hours ago

Really seems like they used it to anonymize the students, but that is a lot less polarizing. Does it matter if they swapped the race? They also swapped all identifying facial features of anyone in the picture. That might have even been the prompt they used in the first place.

I am not a big fan of gen ai, but freak outs about nothingness detract from the real issues. I would be more concerned if they swapped the 3 students into a background or setting they were never in, than use the public setting and swap out the students for ai models.

Edit: please stop saying I didn't read the article. The article is almost exclusively opinion based on the observers reaction. "Slimmed down" is what I an saying is anonymized. As I also said, they put letting on top, so it is a tiny tile in a much larger piece. No problem if people don't agree, but the contention the article gives a lot of info and supporting claims is not true. We only really learn Stanford took the photo from the article, the rest of the conclusions are drawn from the 2 pics

Comment by wavemode 13 hours ago

That explanation doesn't make sense. If the point is anonymity, why not just AI generate the students entirely? They AI-generated the girl on the right in her entirety, so capability clearly isn't the problem. And the guy in the middle is still very much recognizable.

Comment by wand3r 12 hours ago

I don't understand what you mean? For me, it appears all 3 students have been changed. The 3rd student is changed into a black female. I am not doubting they want to inject diversity (although i didnt say it above) my contention is they likely view the original as a blank background, which they inserted 3 "new" anonymized students into. Its not that they turned 1 person "black", its that they changed ALL 3 PEOPLE entirely

Comment by jtmarl1n 12 hours ago

You think the first 2 students were changed as significantly as the 3rd?

The first 2 are still recognizable, the third is not.

Comment by LoganDark 12 hours ago

Given how little the two students on the left changed, I highly doubt the AI made a creative decision to completely randomize only the student on the right. I think it's more likely that they did it in two steps: tweak the faces, and replace the student on the right.

Comment by bpodgursky 13 hours ago

Only a bot who can't parse images would reply with this. Look at the pictures, your thesis is totally wrong.

Comment by DaSHacka 13 hours ago

dang's law: Never attribute to a bot that which is adequately explained by someone not reading TFA

Comment by thakoppno 12 hours ago

funny but presumably this law predates hn. is it actually attributable to him?

full disclosure, this user did not read the article.

Comment by wand3r 13 hours ago

I am not a bot.

Comment by busssard 12 hours ago

The change of the peoples faces might just be an artifact of nano banana regenerating the image.

I have done similar things and it sometimes changes the apperance of the people in the image. They might have also wanted to change the pullover of the guy wearing GAP.

And honestly targetgroup research should have happened before the photograph was taken. Not in post... but hey that was the big promise of genrative models right? The thing is, the marketing department could have posed in their office holding staplers and notepads and then asked the model to recreate the image as well. to even save the cost for the photographer...

Comment by 12 hours ago

Comment by tengbretson 12 hours ago

A tale as old as time. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/uw-booklet-student-added/

Comment by randusername 12 hours ago

I'm not sure which is worse: human marketer instructing AI specifically to make everyone more diverse and attractive or human marketer instructing AI to do basic marketing and AI has internalized to make everyone more diverse and attractive.

Comment by account42 11 hours ago

The worst part is that "diverse" should mean showing how many skin colors you can fit.

Comment by someguynamedq 6 hours ago

Would be interesting to do this as a double blind study to evaluate bias in advertising

Comment by comrade1234 12 hours ago

He makes a pretty attractive black woman. Talk about confusing...

Comment by card_zero 11 hours ago

Strong, too, she's stuck her thumb right through that plate of two-inch spaghetti pieces.

Comment by adithyassekhar 13 hours ago

They went the opposite way from what I assumed from the headline. Also they clearly thought that girl wasn’t slim enough.

Comment by sakex 13 hours ago

What do you mean? It's exactly what I assumed

Comment by DaSHacka 12 hours ago

Yeah honestly anyone familiar with marketing and communications departments (and especially those in higher-ed) is used to this sort of chicanery.

This particular instance is somewhat notable in just how egregious it is, but they pick-and-choose students based solely on ethnicity for photoshoots all the time.

Comment by baud147258 12 hours ago

Hey, at least they used pictures from actual students. I remember looking at promotional material from the higher-ed place I attended and I think I spotted one picture of a familiar classroom with someone I knew, with all the other pictures being of total strangers in rooms that I had never seen. As the school was rather small, I was surprised that it was the case, until I suspected the communication department, unsatisfied with what pictures they had, reached for stock photos.

Comment by LoganDark 12 hours ago

I think if they did that, it would be a lot less of an issue. Here they took a genuine photo and made it fake. It's not representative at all, and it stinks of tokenism which I hate.

Comment by zbrozek 12 hours ago

It looks more like the image on the right is of a banner and isn't flat.

Comment by LoganDark 12 hours ago

Still just as bad IMO. Whitewashing and blackwashing are both racism.

Comment by baggy_trough 13 hours ago

It's more offensive to be prettified by an AI than it is to be removed and replaced entirely.

Comment by LoganDark 12 hours ago

Says who? Compare: "you only need some minor tweaks" versus "you can't be fixed"

Comment by baggy_trough 11 hours ago

Me for one. It's a direct judgement on your appearance, whereas being removed could be for purely demographic reasons.

Comment by LoganDark 7 hours ago

Ah, so for you it's more like "you failed at some achievable goals" versus "there's nothing you could have done" ?

Comment by baggy_trough 4 hours ago

No, not in the least. Bizarre take.

Comment by LoganDark 4 hours ago

What? Take? I'm just trying to understand..? If you don't want me to guess, would you at least be willing to elaborate? Especially if it's a viewpoint I hadn't considered, I'd be curious to know.

Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 13 hours ago

Is this a race to find the most offensive use of AI?

Comment by laserbeam 13 hours ago

Amazing how it's offensive to everyone involved. Both to be replaced and to be represented by an AI rendition.

Comment by a34729t 11 hours ago

Paging Elon Musk... surely you can do worse than this!

Comment by ThrowawayTestr 11 hours ago

At my old job, there was one black guy in the entire department. Every promotional photo, external or internal, had the same 10 year old photo of him posing for the camera.

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by LoganDark 13 hours ago

Tokenism is awful. Unfortunately, speaking out about it is also frowned upon nowadays. To be perfectly clear, I'm only talking about marketing efforts that intentionally ignore or replace unmarked groups with marked ones. Here, they took a real photo and fucking replaced students that didn't look diverse enough for their tastes. I'd argue that should be considered just as bad as the reverse.

To downvoters: I AM NOT saying there should be less diversity. I am saying that fake and dishonest diversity is just as harmful as any other kind of discrimination. Instead of helping the problem it just creates an alternate version.

Comment by bewareofscams 13 hours ago

My account is banned, but for whoever has [showdead]:

This is totally self-inflicted.

Comment by LoganDark 13 hours ago

Self-inflicted by whom? I really don't think the people in the photo are the problem. I think whoever thought they needed to fucking edit it to create a fake impression of diversity needs to stop. If you want to show that your school has diverse students... then take diverse photos. Don't take a non-diverse photo and then diversify it. At best (there are diverse students, but they weren't in the photo) it's dishonest, at worst (there aren't diverse students) it's literally false advertising.

Comment by cucumber3732842 12 hours ago

To quote one of the most prolifically insufferable linkposters of HN: "Demographics are destiny."

So, you fill your university marketing and publication department with people who think this is ok and this is the sort of PR faux-pas whoopsie you eventually get.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that this sort of marketing material needs as many races represented as possible so as many people as possible can at a glance see someone that looks like them and identify with it but something tells me the university isn't gonna come out and own it like that and even then using AI to make a replacement when you have a student body to pull from is kind of icky.

Comment by rayiner 12 hours ago

> I'm sympathetic to the argument that this sort of marketing material needs as many races represented as possible so as many people as possible can see it and see someone that looks like them and identify

It's regressive to want someone to look like you in order to identify with them. And universities like Stanford should be fighting that regressive instinct, not indulging it.

The consequences of not doing so will get ugly. My kids go to a "diverse" private school (but not economically or politically, obviously) and the message the kids get is that white people must reject special affinity for their co-ethnics, while that's acceptable or even encouraged for non-white people. There's a special "black girl magic" weekly lunch, which my daughter was invited to attend once a month because I guess that's how the math works for a half-white, half-asian girl. There is, of course, no affinity group for white (or British or whatever) kids. I think this double standard has only a decade or two before it collapses completely, and the result will be ugly.

Comment by DaSHacka 12 hours ago

I fail to see how these are related whatsoever.

If anything, it adds more fuel to the maga "woke academia" fire.

EDIT: GP has since been edited to elaborate more since this reply was written

Comment by cucumber3732842 12 hours ago

They're related because of an ironic lack of diversity of thought.

If they could have pried any one of the dozen line cooks that Standford RD&E surely employs away from the hookers and blow or got the drunkest frat boys to put down the bottle for a few seconds to ask them they would have been told that AI replacing people with different races and slimming people up is slimy enough that you should give a black girl a free hoodie if that's what it takes to get her to be the token for your stupid staged photo.

Comment by mc32 12 hours ago

I think the student is making a mountain out of a molehill. They didn’t “transform him into a studentin” they just replaced him with a female student in the position he was in the original photo.

Sure, it’s stupid to be so lazy that you can’t use a new photo with whatever characteristics you want. It’s also stupid to slim down a chubby student without permission. I think she has more reason to be upset than he has. That said why does the university see the need to alter reality?