Analyzing Demographic Bias in Artificially Generated Facial Pictures

Artificial generation of facial images is increasingly popular, with machine learning achieving photo-realistic results.

Yet, there is a concern that the generated images might not fairly represent all demographic groups. This has implications for persona development when approaching the goal of generating the facial pictures for the persona profiles automatically.

In research led by Joni Salminen, we use a state-of-the-art method to generate 10,000 facial images and observe that the generated images are skewed towards young people, especially white women.

We provide recommendations to reduce demographic bias in artificial images.

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Salminen, J., Jung, S.G., Chowdhury. S., and Jansen, B. J. (2020) Analyzing Demographic Bias in Artificially Generated Facial Pictures. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’20) (Extended Abstract), Honolulu, HI, USA. 25–30 April, 1-8.