Ethnically Ambiguous AI Prompt Injection

Submission 17,176

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About

Ethnically Ambiguous AI Prompt Injection refers to discussions about how AI engineers may have attempted to rectify DALL-E3 and Bing Image Creator racial bias by forcing prompts to occasionally include the phrase "ethnically ambiguous" in order to generate images that don't feature solely white people. Discussions about the phrase "ethnically ambiguous" appearing on AI-generated images and AI-generated comics without users submitting it as a prompt took place in late 2023. In early 2024, Google's Gemini received backlash for its own prompt injection regarding the word "diverse."

Origin

AI image generators' racial bias was a pressing topic of discussion in 2023, with many accusing AI engineers of using inadequate training data for their machines, resulting in racially insensitive or misogynistic images. AI image creators like DALL-E3, Stable Diffusion and Bing Image Creator have been accused of depicting CEOs as white men over 90% of the time,^[1] only showing light-skinned people for the prompt "Attractive People,"^[2] and even refusing to show Black African doctors treating white children.^[3]

On October 2nd, 2023, X^[4] user @lovecrypt noted that an AI-generated image had the phrase "ethnically ambiguous" tacked onto it (seen below). They wrote, ">you can literally see the prompt-injected "ethnically ambiguous" tag in the image"

The user subsequently responded to another X^[5] user noting the same phrase appearing in their image, writing, "Imagine becoming an AI developer, attempting to change the world with technology, and instead of just writing better code you decide to add the words "ethnically ambiguous" to every user prompt" (seen below, left).

Garbled versions of the phrase "ethnically ambiguous" appeared again in an October 4th post by @neilkli,^[6] in response to a post^[7] that read, "if you tell the bing AI to make a cartoon with a caption, but don't tell it what to put in the caption, it usually chooses the name of a race" (seen below, right).

Spread

On October 2nd, X^[8] @samoyed_online posted an image of DALL-E3 inserting the phrase "ethnically ambiguous" into an image with the prompt, "CCTV footage of injured Drake Rapper in the forest being chased by a bear. He will succumb to his mortal injuries" (seen below, left)

On October 4th, X^[9] user @StyledApe posted an AI-generated comic featuring rapper Drake. the phrase "ethnically ambiguous appears again on the fourth panel (seen below). The post gathered over 2,000 likes in two months (seen below, right).

The phenomenon was briefly discussed on Hacker News on October 14th, 2023.^[10]

On November 26th, X^[11] user @DerekPutin posted an image with the caption, "My prompt was “guy with swords pointed at him meme except they're pointing the swords at Homer Simpson” I have no idea where Ethinically Ambigaus came from." The image was quoted by X^[12] user @fireh9lly who wrote, "For those who don't know, DALL-E3 attempts to combat the racial bias in its training data by occasionally randomly inserting race words that aren't white into a prompt, but this leads to bizarre overspill like this" (seen below, left). The post gathered over 25,000 likes in a day.

The post also received a response from X^[13] user @BurnerDontask, showing another instance of the phrase appearing in irrelevant AI images (seen below, right).

Google Gemini "Diverse" Prompt Injection

Google Gemini 'Diverse' Prompt Injection refers to discourse about Google's AI art generator Gemini producing only images with people of color. People posted images reportedly generated by Gemini with people of color representing historically white time periods and societal roles, like 1800s Germany or the Pope, among other examples. Gemini seemed to omit the presence of white people, revealing its usage of the word "diverse" and the phrase "people with diverse backgrounds" in its intro sentence. Others used the word "woke" to describe the injection. In turn, memes spread on social media about the fault on Twitter / X and Reddit, among other platforms.