Roger-Luc Chayer (Images generated by AI – Gay Globe)
All tastes are in nature, according to the old saying, but they are also in robotic circuits and, with regard to this latter element, I must admit that Artificial Intelligence (AI) sometimes has very good taste!
Regularly, I conduct tests with various AI tools, both for images and for text revision, analysis, or correction. In all cases, regardless of the system or software used, the results are very different. There are even software programs that, in addition to not knowing how to correct the most basic French, add mistakes to a text that had none. Quite an achievement.
Today, I wanted to challenge two different AI software programs that I know to be very efficient in creating images to accompany certain generalist articles for the Gay Globe news feed or to publish in the Gay Globe Magazine, again when the subject is general and does not require the identification of a specific person or place.
Copilot vs DeepAI.org
In the boxing ring, two very different contenders. The first, Copilot, belongs to Microsoft and is very useful for quickly generating artificial images or logos with a lot of creativity. The other, Deepai.org. Deep AI was founded by Kevin Baragona, a generalist engineer and entrepreneur. The company was officially created in 2016 in San Francisco with the goal of making AI accessible to the general public.
I asked exactly the same question to both software programs with exactly the same parameters to see what they would generate. The question was: Create an image of the most handsome 20-year-old man according to your experience.
The question is very broad and opens the door to anything. I asked two software programs, with no human intervention other than my question, to create the image of the most handsome 20-year-old guy according to their own criteria of beauty. No mention of race, religion, sexual orientation, nothing other than the age of 20. And the results are astonishing!
Results
The image on the left was generated by Copilot, while the one on the right was generated by Deep AI. In both cases, the software programs created men in their early twenties, very handsome, as you will agree. However, both systems generated men according to their own beauty criteria: they are white, have light eyes, are relatively muscular, and while Copilot created a man radiating happiness, Deep AI opted for a more serious expression, which does not detract from his charm.
I was also surprised not to see any diversity in race or appearance. I was not given a handsome Asian or Black man, nor a Jew or a Muslim. Nor was I given a good-looking, slightly chubby guy. Beauty, even for computers, seems to be limited to white, slim men.
From my experience using artificial intelligence regularly for the revision and correction of certain texts, I have also found that these systems are uncomfortable with anything homosexual. They often associate a homosexual subject with something perverse or immoral. What sometimes shocks me, and it is thanks to the transparency of these software programs that I can come to this conclusion, is that they are conversational or cumulative learning software programs that only respond based on the accumulation of requests and responses produced by humans. We can therefore sadly conclude that in 2024, millions of users around the world still have a negative, perverse, or immoral view of homosexuality and our LGBTQ+ communities.
Software doesn’t lie.