Is artificial intelligence echoing society’s age bias? That was the question exercising minds at Anything but Grey. The answer appears to have been an unqualified “yes”. The consultancy, which advises businesses and brands on how to engage the demographic, asked “a popular AI generative tool” for colour photographs of average 30, 60,70 and 80 year olds. The response was devoid of nuance, it reports on its blog. “AI almost entirely failed to give up pictures of people who had anything but grey hair. Subjectively, they looked ‘old’, with a few exceptions of clichéd ‘silver foxes’ (invariably male).” Fifty year olds might be “business leaders, adventurous travellers, big users and consumers of technology, party people”. The images its AI prompts generated felt “a full generation older that what most of us would consider the average 50-year-old to be”.
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