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Is ChatGPT a little close-minded, a little old-fashioned in its thinking?
Ask Chanel CEO Leena Nair, who was left disappointed — if not insulted — after she got to experiment with the OpenAI chatbot during her visit to Microsoft's headquarters in Seattle.
Nair, who is the second female global CEO in the iconic fashion house's nearly 115-year history, recalls how she gave ChatGPT a fairly softball image prompt — only for it to screw up badly.
"We're like, 'Show us a picture of a senior leadership team from Chanel visiting Microsoft,'" she said in an interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as quoted by Fortune.
The result? It was "all men in suits," she recalled.
That'd be a mistake at any big corporation, but it's a particularly egregious one to make for Chanel, a brand that mostly caters to women and was founded by one: Coco Chanel, one of the most famous fashion designers in history. You'd think ChatGPT would've scraped a Wikipedia article on that.
"This is Chanel," Nair asserted in the interview. "76 percent of my organization is women. 96 percent of my clients are women. Female CEO," she added, pointing to herself.
"It was a 100 percent male team, not even in fashionable clothes," she roasted. "Like, come on. This is what you've got to offer?"
AI Gaze
Despite what Elon Musk and his ilk of culture warriors might say — that ChatGPT is "woke," or whatever — a wide body of research and embarrassing debacles have demonstrated that generative AI models frequently produce racist and sexist outputs.
Some of the half-baked attempts to put guardrails against this have only heightened the obviousness of their shortcomings.
The problem is that AI models are mostly a product of what they're trained on — the internet, replete with repulsive content — and therefore reinforce the same biases that humans hold. When the tech bears the image of being some impartial, superintelligent arbiter of reality, being presented with its overtly sexualized depictions of women, for example, can be whiplash-inducing.
That being said, Nair is a believer in AI, and says that Chanel has been working on getting "AI-ready." But she's ardent that the tech needs to be designed with "ethics and integrity" in mind.
"I constantly talk to my friends in tech, all the CEOs, saying, 'Come on, guys, you gotta make sure that you're integrating a humanistic way of thinking in AI,'" Nair said, per Fortune.
For now, though, we'd suggest that "AI industry" and "ethics" is a bit of an oxymoron.
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