Stanford University Used AI To Make Students Hotter, More Diverse In Ad, Student Publication Alleges

Stanford University used artificial intelligence to swap a student’s race and gender and make other students appear more attractive in a promotional banner, according to a conservative campus newspaper.

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The allegation comes from The Stanford Review, which reported that Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises ran advertising imagery that had been altered by AI. The technology erased one student from a picture and replaced him with an AI-generated black woman, according to the outlet.

That student, sophomore Billy Ramirez, recognized the shot as one a Stanford photographer had taken, according to the Review. A friend sent him the edited banner while he was driving to campus. (RELATED: Top Law School Declares War On Student Use Of Artificial Intelligence)

“I was driving to school from my hometown when my friend sent me the images comparing the banner to the original photos, and I was immediately baffled. At first, I found it hilarious that they had used AI to completely change our appearances, including my race and gender,” Ramirez told the Review.

“But after looking at the comparison, I was also upset because I don’t agree with Stanford making those choices about how we were represented. Seeing my identity changed and being left out of the picture made me feel, in a way, silenced and erased from a representation that was supposed to include me,” Ramirez added.

The changes went beyond replacing Ramirez, the Review reported. Two students positioned to his right were reshaped to look noticeably thinner. The paper said the doctored banner pulled thousands of responses on Fizz, an anonymous social app popular with college students, and it published side-by-side images showing the photo before and after the AI edits.

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The Review, a conservative student publication Peter Thiel co-founded in 1987, cast the episode as a window into the university bureaucracy’s fixation on identity politics.

In 2000, the University of Wisconsin-Madison altered the cover of an admissions booklet to insert a Black student, Diallo Shabazz, into a crowd of white faces at a 1993 football game, Snopes reported. A student journalist caught the fake after noticing sunlight hit only Shabazz’s face, and the school spent roughly $64,000 reprinting 100,000 copies.

Shabazz had never attended that game. “So I flipped back, and that’s when I saw my head cut off and kind of pasted onto the front cover of the admissions booklet,” he told NPR in 2013.

Stanford has not publicly addressed the Review’s account, and the allegation remains unverified by the university.

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