terrible - and stupid. I mean, is someone going to attend because there’s an african american student or not.
Whatever the pic was - use it.
Or don’t get on students for AI cheating.
I am in no way condoning what Stanford did but several reports have stated that the Hispanic/Latino male on the right, an HSF & QuestBridge scholar, was replaced by a fake African American female. Why a fake one? There are plenty of African American women studying at Stanford. Why not replace with an actual student?
Also, what if the whole trio had been deemed not photogenic (suitable) enough for the marketing collateral? Does a student need to “look the part” in order to thrive here? Quite scary & embarrassing! I thought those days were over.
Given that all three were edited to varying extents, it would seem that someone in R&DE thought that all three were insufficiently photogenic in the original photo.
The devil’s advocate in me wonders how many college marketing photos have been aggressively retouched/edited/manipulated pre-AI. Like maybe the shocking part is not the willingness of the marketing team to do this, but the sheer effectiveness of AI giving that marketing team whatever it really wants.
Perhaps whoever in R&DE did the editing took inspiration from a previous attempt:
Indeed, it may that they got caught this time because the original photo had already been seen by enough people to recognize the altered one as such.
I guess the next step is asking AI to alter it enough to not be busted . . . .
The original unaltered picture was taken back in 2024.
Well the guy on the right was actually replaced with an AI-generated student of a different race & gender without disclosure. What if all three had been replaced with a trio of AI-generated “fake” student images? I read something about them filing Title VI report for discrimination. Leaving AI out of this, the trio could have been replaced with three different students or even three actors posing for the picture, which wouldn’t violate the policy. I don’t think they have a case.
When I was in grad school at UW-Madison, well before the era of AI but not before the era of Photoshop (this happened in 2000-01), there was a case much like this. The university’s communications people photoshopped a photo of a Black student amid a crowd of cheering (white) football fans, leading (justifiably) to much the same uproar that we’re seeing with this case.
Here’s a story about it, from much later, looking back. The photoshop job was even shoddier than I remember): A Campus More Colorful Than Reality: Beware That College Brochure : NPR
Also, colleges can and frequently do send out different types of strategic marketing collateral based on race and other demographic factors, like zip code. Segmented recruitment marketing is currently not regulated.
The Hispanic guy changed out for the girl is nothing compared to the other two edit. The other two edits say a lot more about Stanford, and what they are deep down. They’re saying their students aren’t good looking enough, they need to us AI fakes to sell people on their 100k plus cost of attendance per year. Dark very dark.
It looks like the altered photo was used in a banner displayed in one of the student housing areas. There is no mention of it being used in external marketing. That makes the whole incident seem even more strange.
If I were the parent of the real woman in the photo, I would be livid. Her campus took a literal photo of her, and clearly doctored it to make her look slimmer, then posted it on a banner on campus near some student housing! How is that not telling her and the whole community the university has an issue with her appearance? It is outrageous. Just use a full on AI photo with none of your students if you do not like how the actual ones look. But don’t body shame your students for all their peers to see.
Trying to represent diversity in marketing materials, and not necessarily accurately, goes back a long way, for sure. In the early 2000s I did my masters thesis on this. I compared the ethnicity mix of the student bodies of three categories of schools (selective nationals including Stanford, regionals, and community colleges) to the mix that appeared on their admissions view books, since those were still a thing at the time. What I found was that the selective schools over represented their diversity and community colleges under represented theirs. Regionals were varied, but were generally on target as a group. My study didn’t attempt to get at the why of it all.
What really gets me is that they edited out a Hispanic student.