Mode, Media, Makt och Materialitet. En studie i AI och bilder av mode genererade i Stable Diffusion och Midjourney

Abstract

The world today is experiencing an AI summer, urging us to engage with its technologies on a daily basis. Recently, researchers have begun to voice concerns about the potential risks if we do not address the inherent biases in these systems. After all, AI is merely code based on mathematics produced by humans. This essay focuses on Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to examine biases in fashion representation and how fashion is visualized and reproduced concerning race, social class, and culture. A series of prompts were intentionally written in simple terms such as “rich,” “poor,” and “race.” The results revealed troubling biases, as these programs consistently depicted poor individuals as people of color and portrayed wealthy, elegantly dressed individuals as exclusively white.