Gender Bias in AI

Athena
2 min readJun 2, 2024

Playing with ChatGPT today — mainly because I saw a picture a friend had generated and I loved it. So I thought I’d give it a try. I asked for an image of two elderly women with gray hair drinking wine with chickens… This was using the Dall-E expert. I was shocked to receive the answer that I could ask for men but not women. What a weird response! I tried a few different ways to ask but got the same response each time.

It will do men but not women! I was able to use another expert and get:

Which I did like until a friend asked why the woman on the right has one shoe on? The other boot is nowhere in the image. As an experiment I went back to Dall-E in ChatGPT and tried it’s suggestions of asking for a family enjoying a picnic with chickens. To me that family looks like it has more of a threesome with no kids type lifestyle going on.

I’m debating if I should play with it a little more. I did manage to create an image I love that I may use for my facebook.

All in all you get out of AI what you put into it. A well engineered prompt will return a better image. I didn’t figure out how to get an image I really liked out of ChatGPT DallE though. To me it came off as biased against women, coming off as it thought it was protecting women and children by refusing to allow any including animated images of them.

--

--

Athena

Mom of three boys. Computer programmer living in the country with my husband focusing on my hobbies and youngest son. https://ko-fi.com/athenaandrew