Posted by docdeek 3 hours ago
This particular instance is somewhat notable in just how egregious it is, but they pick-and-choose students based solely on ethnicity for photoshoots all the time.
To downvoters: I AM NOT saying there should be less diversity. I am saying that fake and dishonest diversity is just as harmful as any other kind of discrimination. Instead of helping the problem it just creates an alternate version.
This is totally self-inflicted.
So, you fill your university marketing and publication department with people who think this is ok and this is the sort of PR faux-pas whoopsie you eventually get.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that this sort of marketing material needs as many races represented as possible so as many people as possible can at a glance see someone that looks like them and identify with it but something tells me the university isn't gonna come out and own it like that and even then using AI to make a replacement when you have a student body to pull from is kind of icky.
It's regressive to want someone to look like you in order to identify with them. And universities like Stanford should be fighting that regressive instinct, not indulging it.
The consequences of not doing so will get ugly. My kids go to a "diverse" private school (but not economically or politically, obviously) and the message the kids get is that white people must reject special affinity for their co-ethnics, while that's acceptable or even encouraged for non-white people. There's a special "black girl magic" weekly lunch, which my daughter was invited to attend once a month because I guess that's how the math works for a half-white, half-asian girl. There is, of course, no affinity group for white (or British or whatever) kids. I think this double standard has only a decade or two before it collapses completely, and the result will be ugly.
If anything, it adds more fuel to the maga "woke academia" fire.
EDIT: GP has since been edited to elaborate more since this reply was written
If they could have pried any one of the dozen line cooks that Standford RD&E surely employs away from the hookers and blow or got the drunkest frat boys to put down the bottle for a few seconds to ask them they would have been told that AI replacing people with different races and slimming people up is slimy enough that you should give a black girl a free hoodie if that's what it takes to get her to be the token for your stupid staged photo.
Sure, it’s stupid to be so lazy that you can’t use a new photo with whatever characteristics you want. It’s also stupid to slim down a chubby student without permission. I think she has more reason to be upset than he has. That said why does the university see the need to alter reality?
I am not a big fan of gen ai, but freak outs about nothingness detract from the real issues. I would be more concerned if they swapped the 3 students into a background or setting they were never in, than use the public setting and swap out the students for ai models.
Edit: please stop saying I didn't read the article. The article is almost exclusively opinion based on the observers reaction. "Slimmed down" is what I an saying is anonymized. As I also said, they put letting on top, so it is a tiny tile in a much larger piece. No problem if people don't agree, but the contention the article gives a lot of info and supporting claims is not true. We only really learn Stanford took the photo from the article, the rest of the conclusions are drawn from the 2 pics
The first 2 are still recognizable, the third is not.
full disclosure, this user did not read the article.