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Posted by docdeek 3 hours ago

Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising(stanfordreview.org)
72 points | 53 comments
8f2ab37a-ed6c 2 hours ago|
Throwback to when Microsoft swapped a black guy out for a white guy in an ad meant for Poland: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/aug/26/microsoft...
ecshafer 1 hour ago||
There was an episode of Scrubs where Turk (Black Male Doctor) is annoyed about always being used in advertisements for everything he was in. They had a gag where his college had him copy and pasted twice in the same picture of an advertisement.
rayiner 1 hour ago|
I was looking at a marketing page for a conference I attended. This conference had hundreds of mostly white people. But out of 10 photos of individuals or small groups, 7 centered a non-white person. I was there twice (same photo). I'd like to think I'm just photogenic--but I look like Azis Ansari with better facial hair, lol.
peri-cl 1 hour ago||
Escalate this all the way up to the president of Stanford. Falsifying images is a disreputable act such a prestigious institution will not tolerate.
telotortium 1 hour ago|
Have you seen who the previous president of Stanford was ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Tessier-Lavigne

andsoitis 2 hours ago||
Marketing is about attracting customers.

So the incentives are there to present the image you want to project to attract customers.

rayiner 2 hours ago||
Yes, which is why people study marketing to understand revealed preferences in society. Here, they slimmed down the woman on the left. It's well known that skinnier is more marketable. By the same token, we must assume that they think replacing the hispanic man with a black woman is also an upgrade. By contrast, in China, they sometimes do the opposite: https://variety.com/2015/film/news/star-wars-china-poster-co....
a34729t 50 minutes ago|||
But for the dining hall presummably you dont just want skinny people, because that probably just means lame salads and stuff. Its like if the chef is too skinny, i suspect that.

If i were to do the dining hall ads I'd make everybody super fat. Look how delicious our food is!

ReptileMan 2 hours ago|||
And which exactly customers will be enticed by the modified image?
10xDev 2 hours ago||
Hey buddy, not everything is about cold calculation. Some of us value culture and integrity. These are going to matter even more in the age of AI not less.
andsoitis 2 hours ago|||
Advertising is more about selling aspirations rather than reflect objective reality.

To wit: even the original photo was probably staged…

10xDev 2 hours ago||
Anything you do as a university / person reflects your values. This shows a lack of integrity.
andsoitis 2 hours ago||
> This shows a lack of integrity.

Why?

repeekad 1 hour ago|||
Are you justifying replacing a real hispanic student with a fake black one for "culture and integrity"?..

If you were being sarcastic, it was not clear.

ecshafer 1 hour ago||
10xDev is arguing the opposite, NOT replacing students for some cold calculated marketing, and being more authentic for culture and integrity.
468854259853 2 hours ago||
So Stanford R&DE subscribes to the Jason Arday school of thought.
busssard 1 hour ago||
The change of the peoples faces might just be an artifact of nano banana regenerating the image.

I have done similar things and it sometimes changes the apperance of the people in the image. They might have also wanted to change the pullover of the guy wearing GAP.

And honestly targetgroup research should have happened before the photograph was taken. Not in post... but hey that was the big promise of genrative models right? The thing is, the marketing department could have posed in their office holding staplers and notepads and then asked the model to recreate the image as well. to even save the cost for the photographer...

randusername 2 hours ago||
I'm not sure which is worse: human marketer instructing AI specifically to make everyone more diverse and attractive or human marketer instructing AI to do basic marketing and AI has internalized to make everyone more diverse and attractive.
account42 1 hour ago|
The worst part is that "diverse" should mean showing how many skin colors you can fit.
tengbretson 1 hour ago||
A tale as old as time. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/uw-booklet-student-added/
comrade1234 1 hour ago||
He makes a pretty attractive black woman. Talk about confusing...
card_zero 41 minutes ago|
Strong, too, she's stuck her thumb right through that plate of two-inch spaghetti pieces.
ThrowawayTestr 26 minutes ago|
At my old job, there was one black guy in the entire department. Every promotional photo, external or internal, had the same 10 year old photo of him posing for the camera.
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