Member-only story
Can AI Imagine A Female Software Engineer?
A Midjourney Case Study

It’s no secret that machine learning algorithms are biased when it comes to representing people who don’t happen to be male, white, and able-bodied. Numerous experiments have shown that facial recognition algorithms struggle to identify people of colour, resume scanners deem women less capable, and predictive policing algorithms tend to reinforce existing mistreatment of marginalized communities.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms take user prompts and generate text or images based on that input. They pride themselves on being able to think of anything. Generative AI became popular last year when ChatGPT made its service easily accessible through a browser interface. Other companies have followed suit, and there is now a wide range of accessible generative AI tools. Here I focus on the image generation platform Midjourney.
Imagine a group of software engineers …
In an ongoing project to evaluate gender equality in generative AI, I tried the following prompt on the Midjourney platform:
Software engineers in a code review session, sitting together and providing feedback on each other’s code.