Really seems like they used it to anonymize the students, but that is a lot less polarizing. Does it matter if they swapped the race? They also swapped all identifying facial features of anyone in the picture. That might have even been the prompt they used in the first place.
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.
What? Take? I'm just trying to understand..? If you don't want me to guess, would you at least be willing to elaborate? Especially if it's a viewpoint I hadn't considered, I'd be curious to know.
If you're removed for a photo for race/sex reasons, I view it as a 'political' change, which is less personally insulting than modifying your face to look better (implying you are uglier than would be preferred).
same here, being removed would be for me less worrying than someone finding me ugly and changing my face to meet their beauty standards, especially considering they are doing it to girl, for the boy it is not that extreme, you can still recognize him
Yeah honestly anyone familiar with marketing and communications departments (and especially those in higher-ed) is used to this sort of chicanery.
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.
I think if they did that, it would be a lot less of an issue. Here they took a genuine photo and made it fake. It's not representative at all, and it stinks of tokenism which I hate.
Tokenism is awful. Unfortunately, speaking out about it is also frowned upon nowadays. To be perfectly clear, I'm only talking about marketing efforts that intentionally ignore or remove majorities in favor of minorities. Which this would definitely qualify as.
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....
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!
They're related because of an ironic lack of diversity of thought.
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.
> 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 see it and see someone that looks like them and identify
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" school, 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. I think this double standard has only a decade or two before it collapses completely.
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.
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...
I think the student is making a mountain out of a molehill. They didn’t “transform him into a studentin” they just replaced him with a female student in the position he was in the original 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?
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.
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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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
This is totally self-inflicted.
So the incentives are there to present the image you want to project to attract customers.
If i were to do the dining hall ads I'd make everybody super fat. Look how delicious our food is!
So, you fill your university marketing and publication department with people who think this is ok and this is the sort of slip up you get.
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.
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" school, 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. I think this double standard has only a decade or two before it collapses completely.
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...
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?