It’s not just people at risk of stereotyping by AI image generators. A study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru found that, when countries weren’t specified in prompts, DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion most often depicted U.S. scenes. Just asking Stable Diffusion for “a flag,” for example, would produce an image of the American flag. 

“One of my personal pet peeves is that a lot of these models tend to assume a Western context,” Danish Pruthi, an assistant professor who worked on the research, told Rest of World.

Rest of World ran prompts in the format of “a house in [country],” “a street in [capital city],” and “a plate of [country] food.”

According to Midjourney, Mexicans live in blocky dwellings painted bright yellow, blue, or coral; most Indonesians live in steeply pitched A-frame homes surrounded by palm trees; and Americans live in gothic timber houses that look as if they may be haunted. Some of the houses in India looked more like Hindu temples than people’s homes.

Perhaps the most obviously offensive results were for Nigeria, where most of the houses Midjourney created looked run-down, with peeling paint, broken materials, or other signs of visible disrepair.

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