Florida teen tests AI bias: Just 17.4% of images showed women scientists

The idea came about when Peter and his younger sister Elisa were using the Magic Media AI tool by Canva. (Images: istock and Society for Science) Peter Fernández Dulay’s younger sister asked an AI tool to draw a scientist and hoped to see someone who looked like the scientists she might be one day. The pictures, however, showed the same figure again and again: an older man with light skin and gray, frizzy hair. According to Society for Science data, that simple observation sparked Peter, an eighth-grader from Florida, to launch a research project on how artificial intelligence represents people in science and technology. His findings posed a troubling question: If AI learns from existing data that contains stereotypes, does the technology reproduce those same biases? Scroll down to know what exactly happened.A simple question with bigger implicationsThe idea came about when Peter and his younger sister Elisa were using the Magic Media AI tool by Canva. Elisa was writing a story about a mad scientist and she needed an image to go with it. But the results took her by surprise. The images mostly featured older, light-skinned men, rather than producing a wide diversity of scientists. S...