Dall-E2's Update Generates Less White People When Asked “Photo of a CEO”

Jim Clyde Monge
3 min readJul 21, 2022
A photo of CEO generated by OpenAI Dall-E2 AI
Screenshot from OpenAI

Two weeks ago, I published a story about Dall-E2 generating portrait images from textual descriptions. The images that the AI produced were all white and readers from Reddit and Medium were quick to notice it.

Yesterday, I was surprised to receive an email from OpenAI announcing that they are reducing the bias.

It means Dall-E2 now generates images of people that reflect the diversity of the world’s population.

I tried the new update myself to see if it really reduced the bias in terms of race and color.

Prompt: “A company CEO”

A set of portrait photos generated by AI with prompt “Company CEO”
Image by Author

I’m seeing a lot more diverse results now. There’s a woman, a black guy, and an Asian guy.

Before the update, the images that are returned by the AI are most if not all white people.

One Reddit user asked Dall-E2 to illustrate Mickey Mouse as a real person and gave him the image below.

Image from Reddit

I’m not complaining about why the AI used an Indian guy to represent Mickey, besides he’s a mouse, mice don’t have a human race.

Anyway, this AI tool is still in private beta and can still change in the future.

Other Updates

4 images per prompt

Starting later today, DALL·E will return four images instead of six. This allows more people to experience DALL·E by lessening the strain on our capacity.

Image by Author

Is it a welcome change for existing Beta users?

Apparently, the answer is No. A lot of users are actually pissed off with this update.

More images in history & collection

Jim Clyde Monge

4X Top Writer. Chief Editor at https://generativeai.pub/. Programmer, Artist, Writer. Join me on medium: https://jimclydemonge.medium.com/membership