If you ask a generative A.I. tool to create an image of a wealthy person, a successful investor, or someone who makes smart decisions about money, there’s a good chance the person you’ll see in the A.I.-created image won’t be a woman.
SoFi, a personal finance company, tested this theory with four top A.I. tools: Out of thousands of images of rich people that were generated, less than 2% were of women.
“Even though women continue to excel in their financial lives and there is clear data and statistics to support this, our society, and the mirror to our society, artificial intelligence, still does not recognize this,” Lauren Stafford Webb, SoFi’s chief marketing officer, told Fortune.
To combat this A.I. bias, SoFi is wielding the power of the photo booth.
The company set up a pop-up photo booth at Brookfield Place in New York City for a couple of days last week. Women who entered the photo booth had their snapshot taken, and the photo was then overlaid on a background filled with dollar bills.
Participants who post their image from the photo booth to social media will be entered to win two tickets to a Taylor Swift concert at SoFi Stadium when the singer brings her Eras Tour to the California venue in August.
But the dollar-filled photos have another destination and mission that extends beyond social feeds. After someone’s photo is taken, it’s fed back into an A.I. model and used to retrain the model, SoFi says. The photo booth is part of the company’s “Face of Finance” campaign, which it says is an effort to change incorrect stereotypes about women and their finances, and to set the record straight.
“Women already control $10 trillion in the U.S.—and it’s set to be $30 trillion by 2030,” Webb said. “By correcting what is ultimately a misconception of women and how they handle money, we will be able to empower even more women to get their money right.”
The issue of A.I. bias isn’t limited to the topic of women and money. Female-sounding voice assistants like Siri reinforce the idea that women are compliant and facial recognition tech has been shown to misidentify women, and women of color in particular, at higher rates than other subjects.
But the rise of text-to-image A.I. tools from companies like OpenAI, Midjourney, and Stability AI is bringing the issue to the fore. OpenAI has admitted that its DALL-E 2 image generator “exhibited more gender bias and racial bias” than a similar model the company made for noncommercial purposes. And as A.I. company Hugging Face illustrated with its Stable Diffusion Bias Explorer, the large language models that power generative A.I. often generate results that match typecasts.
SoFi said hundreds of women used the photo booth over the two days of the pop-up. According to SoFi, the photos are being returned to an A.I. model to produce more equal representation of women in finance, though the company would not say which particular A.I. model is being retrained.
Before entering the photo booth, participants are presented with a waiver that explains how the photos will be used.
The ethics around A.I. tools getting consent to use people’s ideas, words, art styles, and likeness is a heated debate. Getty Images sued Stability AI for copyright infringement in February, alleging that the company copied 12 million images to train its A.I. model without a legal basis for using them. And in recent years, states like Virginia, Texas, and California have established laws around deepfakes.
And just this month, the new season of Netflix sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror explored the potential problems that can arise by allowing corporations to use people’s digital likeness in an unsettling episode titled “Joan Is Awful.”
SoFi said that the images generated from the photo booth are inspired by real women, but that it is not using their actual likeness. SoFi is working with OutSnapped, a vendor that offers a virtual and an A.I. photo booth that can make adjustments to photos, adding backdrops, overlays, and props, blending images or graphics in a process known as “synthography.”
