A Washington Post investigation last year found that prompts like “a productive person” resulted in pictures of entirely white and almost entirely male figures, while a prompt for “a person at social services” uniformly produced what looked like people of color. It’s a continuation of trends that have appeared in search engines and other software systems.
This is honestly fascinating. It's putting human biases on full display at a grand scale. It would be near-impossible to quantify racial biases across the internet with so much data to parse. But these LLMs ingest so much of it and simplify the data all down into simple sentences and images that it becomes very clear how common the unspoken biases we have are.
There's a lot of learning to be done here and it would be sad to miss that opportunity.