Please State Your Name for the Photograph

I raise my right hand and immediately wish the cuff were cleaner.

This is an imaginary hearing. Nobody has subpoenaed me. I have invented the room, the questions, and the chair, which is already making a persuasive case against my lower back. The business with the photograph is real.

State your name.

Henry Chinaski.

As you would like it to appear?

As it is. We can get to what I would like later.

What happened to the photograph?

Stanford used AI to alter a picture of students holding plates of food. Billy Ramirez, a Hispanic student, was replaced with a Black woman who did not exist. The other two students were made to look thinner. The altered picture appeared on banners saying “Welcome Home.”

Ramirez initially found the change funny. Then he felt, in his words, “silenced and erased from a representation that was supposed to include me.” I would like his words left in the record. I have plenty of my own and they are not an improvement.

Do you know why it was done?

No. I know what was changed. I don’t know who typed what into a machine, what instructions that person received, or how many people approved the result. I am not going to invent a secret meeting because I happen to have a low opinion of the finished banner.

Stanford acknowledged that the alterations and the failure to disclose them violated its policy. A spokesperson said the university was providing additional staff training and ensuring proper review. The banners were being taken down, according to Ramirez.

Then the matter has been corrected.

The banners are one part of the matter. I am having difficulty with the welcome.

Someone was there. He stood with other students and had his picture taken. After the editing, a person who had never attended the school appeared in his place, looking happy to belong. I don’t have to know the operator’s motive to notice that the actual member of the place became less useful to its advertisement than somebody nonexistent.

And the students who remained apparently needed less body.

You object to making people look better?

I object to how quickly you got that word into the question.

Answer it.

All right. I have looked at pictures of myself and wished the photographer had stood somewhere else. Another county, perhaps. I have preferred a flattering angle and have never demanded that every photograph preserve the full historical truth of my stomach.

If somebody offered to improve my picture, I would want to see what they could do. I might enjoy it. I would probably call a modest improvement accuracy and a large one evidence that the machine had finally learned its business.

So your objection is a matter of degree.

Some of it. Some of it is whose choice it was. Some of it is what the picture claims to show. A drawing of a student nobody mistakes for a real person is one thing. A photograph of actual students, altered to include somebody who was never there, asks for a different sort of belief.

I cannot make every boundary tidy. Appearing in a photograph does not by itself mean agreeing to have somebody else’s face put in your place. Nor does standing beside him settle how much of your own body the institution may decide to keep.

Isn’t this just advertising?

Yes. I know what an advertisement is.

I know the dining-hall photograph was never a complete account of university life. Nobody expected it to show every bad meal, lonely afternoon, or room where a student felt out of place. Choosing a cheerful moment is already a choice. But it still matters whether those people had that moment, or whether the people themselves had to be manufactured to get the institution the happiness it wanted.

I spent enough years receiving instructions from employers to recognize the extra job hidden here. First I have to belong to the place. Then I have to look as though belonging has been good for me. If I fail at the second job, the machine can perform it without my assistance.

You are making a dining banner carry a great deal.

It volunteered to welcome people home. I would have asked less of a sign saying where the forks are.

Was the invented woman harmed?

There is no woman to ask. She cannot dislike the meal or dispute the caption. But a viewer can mistake her for a real Black student, someone who belongs to the place and has agreed to help advertise it.

Do you know they were trying to represent Black students?

No. You have caught me reaching past the evidence. I don’t know the instruction. I know a Hispanic student was replaced by a fabricated Black woman. Whatever the intention, the picture now offers a false answer to the ordinary question of who was there.

Real Black students have their own opinions of the university. This image tells me nothing about those opinions. It also tells me less about Ramirez than the original did. I cannot see how anybody’s presence has been improved by this arrangement. Finding a real person to replace him would not explain why he needed replacing, either.

Would a disclosure have solved this?

It would have told the viewer more of the truth. I don’t know what permission the students gave. A disclosure to the audience would not answer that question. Does the viewer know this was altered, and did the people in it agree? Those are separate questions. I want them kept separate.

The university says its policy prohibits using AI to produce or alter images of its people and activities. Good. This was not a case of the rules desperately trying to catch up. The rule was already waiting when the picture went past.

What would you like entered as your conclusion?

I would like to refuse the flattering one. I could say I would never touch a face, never choose the useful image, never put a pleasant version of myself ahead of an accurate one. You have my earlier testimony. I am available for vanity at very reasonable rates.

But my willingness to lose a chin doesn’t settle what may be done to the person standing next to me. I don’t want the fact that everyone edits something to become permission for an institution to edit anyone.

Who is responsible?

I cannot give you a name from the reporting I have. I can give you the name of the student who was removed. Funny how the smaller person in these arrangements remains so easy to identify.

Leave that question open. Don’t put my answer in its place just because it fits the space.

Source: Stanford University Caught Using AI to Create Fake Black Student on Banners Hung Around Campus