"Draw me a curator" Examining the visual stereotyping of a cultural services profession by generative AI
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Abstract (arXiv)
Based on 230 visualisations, this paper examines the depiction of museum curators by the popular generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) model, ChatGPT4o. While the AI-generated representations do not reiterate popular stereotypes of curators as nerdy, conservative in dress and stuck in time rummaging through collections, they contrast sharply with real-world demographics. AI-generated imagery extremely underrepresents women (3.5% vs 49% to 72% in reality) and disregards ethnic communities other than Caucasian (0% vs 18% to 36%). It only over-represents young curators (79% vs approx. 27%) but also renders curators to resemble yuppie professionals or people featuring in fashion advertising. Stereotypical attributes are prevalent, with curators widely depicted as wearing beards and holding clipboards or digital tablets. The findings highlight biases in the generative AI image creation dataset, which is poised to shape an inaccurate portrayal of museum professionals if the images were to be taken uncritically at face value.
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References · 8
- 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
- 2023Cultural Bias and Cultural Alignment of Large Language Modelscited by 149
- 2023Uncurated Image-Text Datasets: Shedding Light on Demographic Biascited by 52
- 2025BBQ-V: Benchmarking Visual Stereotype Bias in Large Multimodal Modelscited by 11
- 2024Generative Discrimination: What Happens When Generative AI Exhibits Bias, and What Can Be Done About Itcited by 7
- 2025Building Trustworthy Multimodal AI: A Review of Fairness, Transparency, and Ethics in Vision-Language Taskscited by 7
- 2025How Do Generative Models Draw a Software Engineer? A Case Study on Stable Diffusion Biascited by 2
- 2023Generative AI May Prefer to Present National-level Characteristics of Cities Based on Stereotypical Geographic Impressions at the Continental Levelcited by 1
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