AI Was Asked to Generate Images of 'Most Stereotypical Person' From Several Countries. Here Are the Results
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Developments in artificial intelligence seem to be happening so fast we often have to play catch up. ChatGPT is revolutionizing how we scour the internet for data, and speech-to-text and text-to-image apps are upending traditional methods of content creation, among their many other practical uses.
Text-to-image apps like Midjourney are especially intriguing as it can generate virtually any image you can think of with just the right prompt you feed into it. Sometimes they’re funny and benign, but there are the occasional prompts that elicit confusion, ridicule, and sometimes, even outrage.
Like this latest one uploaded into the r/midjourney subreddit. User WeirdLime gave Midjourney the prompt “the most stereotypical person in [country]” and it generated images of, well, exactly that.
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“This isn’t stereotypical, it’s real!” one user said about the Irish guy, who is sitting down wearing a green and white beanie, a scarf, and a green jacket looking forlorn. The Italian guy, meanwhile, is a man wearing a dapper suit, newsboy hat, sitting in front of a table covered in red-and-white checkered tablecloth with pizza and what looks like a bottle of Italian wine.
Ireland
Italy
Switzerland
The guy from Switzerland is pictured wearing printed overalls on a meadow overlooking a lake and mountain, with a cow beside him, while the man from France is wearing a beret, round, John-Lennon style glasses, a retro style shirt with a bowtie and he’s standing in front of, well, the Eiffel Tower. You can’t get more French than that.
Most of the comments were of sarcasm and amusement. The post was actually Part 2 of an earlier post with the qualifier “–no male” added.
France
Greece
Check out the old Greek woman sitting on a bench along a cobblestoned path and holding a platter of Greek food; or the Czech woman holding a rooster and wearing what looks like a rooster hat; of the Belgian woman in a red-and-white striped shirt and hat posing in front of a bicycle with what looks like Belgian waffles.
“I was pleasantly surprised by the french one that actually looks like one of our small villages...until I saw the eiffel tower church in the background,” said user Tolnousse. The replies to the comment offered some of the users’ take on how exactly the AI is generating the images.
France
Belgium
“I love how Midjourney thinks every other building in France is the Eiffel tower,” said u/sawskooh. “It's like trying to generate any image of rural Cambodia -- even the huts look like Angkor Wat.”
“Can one argue that that's the way the AI has learned from the data it was trained on?” asked u/Consistent_Zebra7737. “Our data. Like, most mentions (including images) of Paris on the Internet are accompanied by a parallel mention of the Eiffel tower. To a limited extent, the A.I. is a reflection of us.”
No one has yet attempted to make one for "most stereotypical person" from the Philippines.
Texas
Florida
California
Meanwhile, u/NeutronicTachyon presumably wanted to localize the prompt and asked Midjourney to generate images on “the most stereotypical person in [US state name]."
It’s difficult to relate to these posts unless you know people from the featured states, but most commenters in the post seemed to be tickled, with a small minority being none too pleased.
What do YOU think?
