American == White in Multimodal Language-and-Image AI

TL;DR

This paper investigates biases in state-of-the-art multimodal AI models, revealing they associate American identity predominantly with White individuals, reflecting societal biases and affecting downstream tasks.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that language-and-image AI models learn and propagate racial biases linking American identity with Whiteness, with implications for fairness and representation.

Findings

White individuals more associated with American identity in embeddings.

AI models more likely to identify White individuals as American.

Models exhibit racial bias in captioning and image generation tasks.

Abstract

Three state-of-the-art language-and-image AI models, CLIP, SLIP, and BLIP, are evaluated for evidence of a bias previously observed in social and experimental psychology: equating American identity with being White. Embedding association tests (EATs) using standardized images of self-identified Asian, Black, Latina/o, and White individuals from the Chicago Face Database (CFD) reveal that White individuals are more associated with collective in-group words than are Asian, Black, or Latina/o individuals. In assessments of three core aspects of American identity reported by social psychologists, single-category EATs reveal that images of White individuals are more associated with patriotism and with being born in America, but that, consistent with prior findings in psychology, White individuals are associated with being less likely to treat people of all races and backgrounds equally. Three downstream machine learning tasks demonstrate biases associating American with White. In a visual question answering task using BLIP, 97% of White individuals are identified as American, compared to only 3% of Asian individuals. When asked in what state the individual depicted lives in, the model responds China 53% of the time for Asian individuals, but always with an American state for White individuals. In an image captioning task, BLIP remarks upon the race of Asian individuals as much as 36% of the time, but never remarks upon race for White individuals. Finally, provided with an initialization image from the CFD and the text "an American person," a synthetic image generator (VQGAN) using the text-based guidance of CLIP lightens the skin tone of individuals of all races (by 35% for Black individuals, based on pixel brightness). The results indicate that biases equating American identity with being White are learned by language-and-image AI, and propagate to downstream applications of such models.