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Chanel CEO Leena Nair calls out ChatGPT after it imagines her team as all men, OpenAI responds
Chanel CEO Leena Nair called out ChatGPT after it generated an all-male image of her leadership team, prompting OpenAI to acknowledge AI’s bias problem.
Chanel’s global CEO Leena Nair has called out OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the AI tool allegedly generated a gender-biased image that depicted the luxury brand’s senior leadership team as entirely male.
In an interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nair revealed that she and her team visited Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond and decided to test ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities. “We’re like, ‘Show us a picture of a senior leadership team from Chanel visiting Microsoft’— it is all men in suits,” she said, as reported by Fortune.
The output, Nair said, was a far cry from reality. “It was a 100% male team, not even in fashionable clothes,” she said, adding, “Like, come on. This is what you’ve got to offer?”
Nair, who became Chanel’s second female CEO in 2022, pointed out that 76% of the brand’s employees are women, including herself, and that 96% of its customers are female, making the AI-generated image inaccurate.
(Also Read: Saying ‘thanks’ to ChatGPT is costing OpenAI tens of millions of dollars, says Sam Altman)
What did OpenAI say?
In response to Nair’s remarks, an OpenAI spokesperson told Fortune that addressing bias remains a significant challenge in the field. “We are continuously iterating on our models to reduce bias and mitigate harmful outputs,” the spokesperson said.
Gender biases in AI
Notably, ChatGPT and other large language models have faced similar criticism before. According to Fortune, a 2023 UCLA study found that AI systems used more authoritative words like “expert” and “integrity” for men, while describing women with terms like “beauty” and “delight.”
Another 2024 University of California study revealed that GPT models responded with more stereotyping or dismissive content when users employed Indian, Irish, or Jamaican dialects.
However, despite the issue, Nair said AI integration at Chanel is “nonnegotiable”. “AI is everywhere, yes, and it’s going to be transformative in our world, so luxury has to engage with it. Chanel has to engage with it,” she said.
“It’s so important that we keep the ethics and integrity of what we’re doing,” Nair added. “I constantly talk to my friends in tech, all the CEOs, saying, ‘Come on, guys, you gotta make sure that you’re integrating a humanistic way of thinking in AI,’” she said.
