The Bias Breaker works by incorporating key diversity factors like age, race, ability, gender identity, and religion from sources such as Citizens Advice, Gov.uk, and the U.S. Census Bureau, into AI-generated prompts.
When you prompt Pencil to generate a CEO, the technology automatically applies these diversity criteria by randomly selecting one or more factors to enrich the prompt, resulting in what The Brandtech Group considers a more inclusive output.
“It’s still incumbent on the human user to choose good images and consciously prompt to make good choices,” Sykes said.
Beyond gender and profession bias
AI-generated images reveal biases extending to descriptions, affecting representations beyond just gender and profession.
The Brandtech Group’s clients frequently target products to people at various life stages, using prompts like emotional, strong, intelligent, beautiful, or menopausal. However, the default AI images for “beautiful” often skew toward young and slim women. When prompted for ‘menopause,’ foundational AI models aggregated within Pencil generated images of significantly older women in their 70s instead of 40s or 50s. And “emotional” is almost always associated with women, while “strong” is linked to men, according to The Brandtech Group.
