Woke Stanford University Caught Using AI to Race-Swap Male Student with Black Female in Ad — Student Left Feeling ‘Silenced and Erased’
Stanford University, an institution that receives hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding, was caught red-handed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to digitally erase a student and replace him with an AI-generated Black woman in university promotional materials.
The conservative campus paper The Stanford Review reported Monday that Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises took a photograph shot by a university photographer, ran it through AI, and published the doctored result as advertising.
Sophomore Billy Ramirez recognized the original shot. In the banner that went out, he was gone. In his place: an AI-generated Black woman. Two students to his right were also digitally slimmed down and had their faces altered.
“I was driving to school from my hometown when my friend sent me the images comparing the banner to the original photos, and I was immediately baffled,” Ramirez told The Stanford Review.
“At first, I found it hilarious that they had used AI to completely change our appearances, including my race and gender. But after looking at the comparison, I was also upset because I don’t agree with Stanford making those choices about how we were represented. Seeing my identity changed and being left out of the picture made me feel, in a way, silenced and erased from a representation that was supposed to include me.”
Hypocritically, Stanford’s own written AI guidelines for marketing and communications make the violation even more blatant.
The university’s policy states that “any application involving the creation of synthetic media depicting real individuals is not permitted without explicit consent.” It also requires disclosure when AI-generated or AI-manipulated images could mislead people about what is real, and it forbids content that falsely depicts Stanford people.
Yet campus bureaucrats appear to ignore their own ethics rules when pushing political agendas.
None of this should surprise anyone who has watched Stanford for the last several years.