National identity stereotypes through generative AI

For Rest of World, Victoria Turk breaks down bias in generative AI in the context of national identity.

Bias in AI image generators is a tough problem to fix. After all, the uniformity in their output is largely down to the fundamental way in which these tools work. The AI systems look for patterns in the data on which they’re trained, often discarding outliers in favor of producing a result that stays closer to dominant trends. They’re designed to mimic what has come before, not create diversity.

“These models are purely associative machines,” Pruthi said. He gave the example of a football: An AI system may learn to associate footballs with a green field, and so produce images of footballs on grass.

Between this convergence to stereotypes and the forced diversity from Google’s Gemini, has anyone tried coupling models with demographic data to find a place in between?

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Outsourced work and generative AI

For Rest of World, Andrew Deck turned the AI focus on outsourced workers, whose jobs have been directly affected as of late and will probably shift much more. Deck profiled and commissioned four workers to make things without AI and with:

For more than seven years, Santiago Bautista González worked full time selling his cartoon-style illustrations, using the freelance gig marketplace Fiverr. His income, around $1,500 in a good month, dropped by a third this past January. February was equally disappointing.

In search of an explanation, Bautista, 31, read about the growing popularity of visual generative AI software. He found that Fiverr had added a section for AI artists. “And I say, ‘Well, maybe it’s because of this,'” he told Rest of World.

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All the parts of daily life in India controlled by Mukesh Ambani

Mukesh Ambani has an estimated net worth of $90.7 billion, because his company controls many facets of Indian daily life:

Ambani’s wealth comes from the enormous Reliance Industries conglomerate. Since taking over from his father, Ambani has turned Reliance — once known for textiles and petrochemicals — into a digital powerhouse. He’s grown the company’s reach through acquisitions and partnerships to reach retail, telecommunications, media, and so much more, creating an empire with unimaginable reach.

The piece from Rest of World drives the point home with a stroll through illustrations that start with a single phone and keeps zooming out until you’re looking at the whole planet.

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