Try as they might, AI image generators can’t seem to produce a convincing likeness of vice president Kamala Harris.
In an astonishingly lazy attempt to portray Harris as a “communist dictator” last week, Elon Musk shared an image produced by his xAI venture’s Grok image generator of a woman wearing a red suit. The only problem, as X users were quick to point out? She looked almost nothing like the actual Harris, as Wired reports.
“Grok put old Eva Longoria in a snazzy outfit and called it a day,” one user joked.
It wasn’t just the one image. As more and more people are noticing online, Grok absolutely butchers any attempt to depict Harris. Interestingly, the weakness doesn’t extend to her rival, with Wired finding that Grok can generally produce a passable imitation of former president Donald Trump’s orange visage.
It’s not just Grok, either. Competing AI image generators like Midjourney, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini don’t allow users to produce pictures of politicians. But in Wired‘s experimentation, open-source generators also struggled with Harris.
“We actually don’t talk enough about how every AI just CANNOT replicate Kamala Harris,” another user pointed out. “It’s uncanny how failed the algorithm is at an AMERICAN (of South Indian and Jamaican heritage).”
At times, AI depicts Harris as looking “more like former First Lady Michelle Obama,” in Wired‘s estimation, appearing with “varying features, hairstyles, and skin tones.”
One image making the rounds on X-formerly-Twitter shows an attempt at Harris’ face adorning a bag of Doritos chips — but beyond a vague attempt at her hair and signature navy blue suit, the face bears almost no resemblance to the real Harris.
A different image shows Harris and former president Barack Obama riding a pig. Though Obama’s likeness shines through, Harris is again essentially unrecognizable.
Trump also gave it whirl last week, generating a picture of Harris wearing a red hat — and sporting a bizarre, Stalinesque mustache. Without the Groucho Marx-like disguise, though, the woman in the image looks little like Harris.
The problem is especially striking because Harris, as the vice president, has been photographed an extraordinary number of times, giving models a wealth of training data.
Another explanation might be, as researchers have long pointed out, that facial recognition still doesn’t work as well for darker skin tones, which could result in AI models struggling to recognize Harris’ face in large datasets.
We’ve already come across facial recognition software struggling to identify light- or dark skinned women. In 2019, researchers even found that object detection systems designed for self-driving cars were astonishingly bad at recognizing pedestrians with darker skin.
And as the Washington Post reported last year, AI image generators are still prone to tap into racist clichés.
But while these right-wing images of Harris as a “communist dictator” are poor renditions, the damage has already been done.
Musk’s intention wasn’t to create a photorealistic representation, after all — it was to push a false narrative about the centrist Harris, who has virtually nothing in common with actual communists.
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