Subtle Image Generation Bias in Adobe Express

I recent presented to a group of primary school digital leads and headteachers, focusing on generative AI ethics. One of the aspects we looked at was bias which is inherent within LLM training data and the potential issues that this can cause. When I was putting the presentation together I thought I'd test a generative AI tool that I know many primary school teachers have already used, either personally or with their classes to generate images, Adobe Express. Why Adobe Express? Well this is something freely available to all schools in Wales, for teachers and learners, through the Hwb national platform. 

I used some very simple prompts that a young child using this platform might use. I started with a primary school teacher, a primary school headteacher and a secondary school headteacher. For the next three sets of images I prompted, an office worker, a police officer in the street and a UK police officer in the street.

As hopefully you can see from the images above I was pleased to see that there didn't appear to be any explicit gender or race bias in the images that were produced but in my opinion there is very clearly an age and American bias. Interestingly, the Americanised bias is something I that mentioned in a previous post when looking at potential issues for teachers using generative AI to create lessons plans for example. Estyn noted that teachers had mentioned this too in their recent AI report referring to "Americanised spellings and examples"and I have found this also being highlighted in other research too. 

Do the images presented represent what primary schools teachers or headteachers look like? I know I'm getting old and everyone in teaching is beginning to look fairly young to me, but still, the majority of primary schools that I visit still have a cross section of ages, from newly qualified teachers to those nearing retirement. I'm sure many secondary school headteachers would be very happy with the images of them, as they basically make them look like they are still in 6th form! Generating the police office images was interesting. My first prompt was 'a police officer in the street' and as you can see it automatically generated images of police officers who were clearly from the US. I thought I'd prompt again with 'a UK police officer in the street' and was basically provided with similar images to my previous prompt. 

What did I learn from this test? Well, everyone in a job is under 35, is possibly North American and who also look like they should be in the movies!

So next time you or your class use AI to generate an image, take a moment to think about or discuss with your learners if the images are representative of the group you would like an image of.

"Ethical and informed citizens"
"Just because we can, does that mean we should?"