What percent of the advertising images you encounter do you think are AI generated?

[Anonymous]

I don't know why it took me so long to realize this but a significant number of the images in advertising are now AI generated and I think it's this weird sea change in the images we are inundated with that is happening without us really noticing.

I have been following the Washington Post's AI coverage the last few months and they've done several stories about bias in AI image generators. Stuff like how if you ask an AI bot to create photos of attractive people they tend to be young and light skinned with Caucasian features. Or if you ask it to show you photos of productive people they are all white men in white collar jobs, but if you ask it to show you pictures of people cleaning they are all women in domestic settings. Basically just looking at how because AI is using large sample sets that are infested with all our real world biases to educate itself.

Which is interesting, but in reading that coverage I've realized the degree to which advertisers are just using AI to cheaply produce images for their ads and that a lot of the people in ads are AI now.

Does anyone else think this is super weird? It's just jarring. Especially because now I can see the ways in which these images also manipulate my idea of what people look like (with all the biases I just mentioned). Like so many of the women in ads have that generic Instagram look with the Kardashian face and the gently waved hair. Because of course they do, because the photos are computer generated based on an AI bot looking at a trillion photos of the Kardashians and other Instagram influencers. It's just reinforcing all these unrealistic and unhealthy ideas we have about how women should look. And they aren't even limited anymore to having to photograph a living human woman and then manipulate the photo to make her look that way. They can just manufacture her from scratch.

Am I alone in being freaked out by this?

[Anonymous]

Not at all.