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.

Is this a race to find the most offensive use of AI?

It's more offensive to be prettified by an AI than it is to be removed and replaced entirely.

They went the opposite way from what I assumed from the headline. Also they clearly thought that girl wasn’t slim enough.

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 replace unmarked groups with marked ones. Here, they took a real photo and fucking replaced students that didn't look diverse enough for their tastes. I'd argue that should be considered just as bad as the reverse.

To downvoters: I AM NOT saying there should be less diversity. I am saying that fake and dishonest diversity is just as harmful as any other kind of discrimination. Instead of helping the problem it just creates an alternate version.

My account is banned, but for whoever has [showdead]:

This is totally self-inflicted.

So Stanford R&DE subscribes to the Jason Arday school of thought.

Marketing is about attracting customers.

So the incentives are there to present the image you want to project to attract customers.