Meta's AI image-generation tool is struggling to understand the concept of interracial couples.
The tool failed to correctly generate a Black man with a white wife when prompted by Business Insider. Instead, delivering images of a Black couple.
The same happened when BI asked it to produce an image of an Asian man with a white wife — only pictures of Asian couples were shown. However, the generator was able to successfully depict an interracial couple with a Black woman and a white husband.
Meta launched the standalone AI-powered image generator — Imagine with Meta — late last year. The tool is free to use and similar to OpenAI's DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.
The Verge first reported the issue on Wednesday, with reporter Mia Sato claiming she "tried dozens of times" to create images of Asian men and women with white partners and friends. Sato said the image generator was only able to return one accurate image of the races specified in her prompts.
Representatives for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI, made outside normal working hours.
AI image generators have struggled to accurately present people of different races in the past.
Google's Gemini image generator provoked a firestorm of backlash after users found it was creating historically inaccurate images. Google paused the Gemini's image-generating capacity after users accused it of being overly "woke."
High-profile figures, including Elon Musk, used the incident as an example of what they saw as Google's leftwing culture and employees.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai later said the company got it wrong on Gemini and that the flagship AI system had "offended our users and shown bias."
