The PGA Tour is being questioned for negligence with its use of artificial intelligence (AI).
In a TikTok video, AI ethicist Paige Lord shared AI-generated images of golfers Tony Finau and Collin Morikawa that have raised concerns.
“Here we have two players of color who are portrayed in environments that are very different than all of the other environments,” Lord said in the video.
@thepaigelord Was there bias in the @PGATOUR AI headshots? #ai #pga #golf #pgatour #aiethics #algorithmicbias #reaponsibleai #ml #aiml #greenscreen ♬ original sound – Paige Lord
The white golfers who are shown are all in front of gray neutral backdrops. However, for Finau, in particular, he is in front of what Lord described as a “rugged” background.
“I think it’s important to address two things related to this,” she said. “The first one is that there’s bias in AI and that AI is largely beholden to whatever it has been trained on. So for example, if the image completion portion of this AI has been trained on photos of people of color standing in what might look like a dilapidated area then it might complete a photo for a person of color standing in a dilapidated area.”
Lord also pointed out that it’s the PGA’s social media management team’s duty to ensure that they are not posting harmful images.
“If they’re going to be leveraging artificial intelligence, take a look at what the AI is producing and ask the question about whether or not they want to put that out there in the world,” she said. “Because even if they didn’t aid the AI in creating this — they just put it into the prompt like they did it for everybody else — they still have to understand that AI has bias and that it is their responsibility at the end of the day.”
TikTok users in the comment section of the video expressed their shared sentiments on the importance of discussing the issue at hand.
“So many people will brush this off as coincidence but it’s so real and happens all the time,” one user commented.
