Sasha Luccioni

They're probably of other women named Sasha who put photographs of themselves up on the internet.

And this can probably explain why, when I query an image generation model to generate a photograph of a woman named Sasha, more often than not, I get images of bikini models.

Sometimes they have two arms, sometimes they have three arms, but they rarely have any clothes on.

And why it can be interesting for people like you and me to search these data sets.

For artists like Carla Ortiz, this provides crucial evidence that her life's work, her artwork, was used for training AI models without her consent.

And she and two artists used this as evidence to file a class action lawsuit against AI companies for copyright infringement.

And most recently...

And most recently, Spawning AI partnered up with Hugging Face, the company where I work at, to create opt-in and opt-out mechanisms for creating these data sets.

Because artwork created by humans shouldn't be an all-you-can-eat buffet for training AI models.

The very last thing I want to talk about is bias.

You probably hear about this a lot.

Formally speaking, it's when AI models encode patterns and beliefs that can represent stereotypes or racism and sexism.

One of my heroes, Dr. Joy Bolognini, experienced this firsthand when she realized that AI systems wouldn't even detect her face unless she was wearing a white colored mask.

Digging deeper, she found that common facial recognition systems were vastly worse for women of color compared to white men.

And when models like this, biased models like this, are deployed in law enforcement settings, this can result in false accusations, even wrongful imprisonment, which we've seen happen to multiple people in recent months.

For example, Portia Woodruff was wrongfully accused of carjacking at eight months pregnant because an AI system wrongfully identified her.

But sadly, these systems are black boxes, and even their creators can't say exactly why they work the way they do.

And for example, for image generation systems, if you're used in contexts like generating a forensic sketch based on a description of a perpetrator,

They take all those biases and they spit them back out for terms like dangerous criminal, terrorist or gang member, which of course is super dangerous when these tools are deployed in society.

And so in order to understand these tools better, I created this tool called the Stable Bias Explorer, which lets you explore the bias of image generation models through the lens of professions.