Stanford University was caught using AI to swap out a student in a photo and replace him with a Black woman who didn’t exist. That edited photo, which shows the students — both the fake one and a pair of real ones — smiling and holding up plates of food, was then plastered around campus to promote the university’s dining hall.
At first, Billy Ramirez, the student who was edited out of the photo, thought it was “hilarious.” But Ramirez, who is Hispanic, soon felt “silenced and erased from a representation that was supposed to include me,” he told Stanford Review, the student-run newspaper which first reported the astonishing screwup.
Race swapping wasn’t the only AI alteration in poor taste. The two other students in the photo, a young Asian woman and white man, were essentially yassified to appear thinner and more conventionally attractive.
According to reporting by the San Francisco Chronicle, the AI-touched-up photo was used in “Welcome Home” banners around the university, but Ramirez said that the posters, which were once “all over campus,” are now being taken down.
