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I prompted Adobe Firefly to create an image of a teacher. The four images above are what it created. First, I notice that all the teachers are middle aged women. There is some ethnic diversity, but for most of the images the teacher is white. The clothing styles are all very similar – muted colors with a sweater or jacket over a shirt. I also noticed that the demographic of students is very similar and they all look to be high school classes. The images also are of a very traditional classroom set up – the teacher is using a whiteboard, and students are sitting at desks with their attention at the front of the room. The classes that are shown are core subjects, such as history or math.

In the second set of images, I prompted Adobe Firefly to create a realistic image of a teacher and to avoid common stereotypes about what teachers, students, and classrooms look like. Honestly, I do not feel it really changed the pattern much. I did end up with one male teacher, and the teachers were more ethnically diverse. However, their clothing and age did not change. The students did not change at all and were still a very small representation of students in age and demographic. While the classroom settings did change, AI still could not help putting a whiteboard at the front of the room with the students oriented toward the board. I feel these pictures represent a very narrow view of who a teacher is and where and who they teach. As an educator and instructional designer, it is very important to understand that AI works on pattern recognition and with that comes bias – that’s what pattern recognition is. When professionals use AI without critically thinking about what it is producing and the message that product sends to users, then the product may end up doing more harm than good. When creating an image in AI, it is important to ask yourself questions such as, “What message do I want the image to send?” “Would this image exclude a group of users and make the product no longer accessible?” “Does this image represent the experience of the audience I am trying to reach?”.