Why Is AI So Bad at Generating Images of Kamala Harris?

September 10, 2024:

When Elon Musk shared an image showing Kamala Harris dressed as a “communist dictator” on X last week, it was quite obviously a fake, seeing as Harris is neither a communist nor, to the best of our knowledge, a Soviet cosplayer. And, as many observers noted, the woman in the photo, presumably generated by X’s Grok tool, had only a passing resemblance to the vice president.

“AI still is unable to accurately depict Kamala Harris,” one X user wrote. “Looks like they’re posting some random Latina woman.”

“Grok put old Eva Longoria in a snazzy outfit and called it a day,” another quipped, noting the similarity of the “dictator” pictured to the Desperate Housewives star.

“AI just CANNOT replicate Kamala Harris,” a third posted. “It’s uncanny how failed the algorithm is at an AMERICAN (of South Indian and Jamaican heritage).”

Many AI images of Harris are similarly bad. A tweet featuring an AI-generated video showing Harris and Donald Trump in a romantic relationship—it culminates in her holding their love child, which looks like Trump—has nearly 28 million views on X. Throughout the montage, Harris morphs into what look like different people, while the notably better Trump imagery remains fairly consistent.

When we tried using Grok to create a photo of Harris and Trump putting their differences aside to read a copy of WIRED, the results repeatedly depicted the ex-president accurately while getting Harris wrong. The vice president appeared with varying features, hairstyles, and skin tones. On a few occasions, she looked more like former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Grok is different from some high-profile AI image generators in that it allows users to create faked photos of political figures. Earlier this year, Midjourney began blocking its users from creating images of Trump and President Joe Biden. (The ban extends to Harris.) The move followed publication of a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate that found that the tool could be used to generate a range of politically charged images.

Similarly, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini refused to produce images of Harris or Trump in WIRED’s testing. Meanwhile, a number of open source image generators will, like Grok, produce images of politicians. WIRED found one such model, Stable Diffusion, also produced not-great pictures of Harris.

Modern AI image generators use what are known as diffusion models to generate images from text prompts. These models are fed many thousands of labeled images, typically scraped from the web or collected from other sources. Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of Freepik, a company that hosts various AI tools, including several image generators, tells WIRED that the difficulty such generators have conjuring up Harris, compared to Trump, is that they have been fed fewer well-labeled pictures.

Despite being a prominent figure, Harris hasn’t been as widely photographed as Trump. WIRED’s search of photo supplier Getty Images bears this out; it returned 63,295 images of Harris compared to 561,778 of Trump. Given her relatively recent entry into the presidential race, Harris is “a new celebrity,” as far as AI image makers are concerned, according to Cuenca Abela. “It always takes a few months to catch up,” he says.

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