Stanford AI Usage, ‘Face Swaps’ on Campus Banner Spark National Backlash
Stanford University senior Billy Ramirez returned to campus this fall to find that the university’s housing and dining department used artificial intelligence to replace him with a Black woman on a public banner.
Stanford Residential and Dining Enterprises, which oversees the university’s housing operations, dining services and campus conferences, hung the promotional banner in a student housing center, according to The Stanford Daily.
The outlet also reported that the original photo, taken in Stern Dining during a 2024 Lunar New Year celebration, was previously used unaltered.
In addition to replacing Ramirez, Stanford R&DE made significant changes to the other two students’ faces. The edits and use of AI caused a stir on the campus social media app, Fizz, according to the Daily, consequently drawing national attention.
“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 told the Stanford Review, an independent paper founded by venture capitalist and university alum Peter Thiel.
Ramirez’s class was the last cohort admitted to a U.S. college before the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action in 2023.
The Brookings Institute found that these changes had a sizable impact on the racial profile of college populations across the country.
At Stanford, enrollment for Black or African American students fell from 8.9% to 4.5% and enrollment for Hispanic or Latino students fell from 16.7% to 14.6%.
At the same time, Asian student enrollment increased from 28.8% to 33%, and White student enrollment increased from 21.9% to 24.1%.
Universities have a long history of artificially diversifying models in their marketing. In 2019, Inside Higher Ed reported on a series of incidents, including one at York College of Pennsylvania, where the school used Photoshop to replace two white students “with an African American student and (seemingly) Muslim student.”
Stanford AI researcher Maty Bohacek said he found the situation “highly problematic” and explained how AI image editing introduces new problems to an old story.
“Humans would most likely go into Photoshop and start working on specific areas of the image,” Bohacek, who focuses on media integrity, said. “But AI models these days, most of them anyway, can’t do that.”
Bohacek said that most publicly available AI models cannot work directly with individual pixels, the way a human would in photoshop. Instead, they take the entire image, convert it into a mathematical form, make edits, then convert it back into an image.
During this process, other parts of the photo can also be altered, like the two students to the left of Ramirez, he said, and biases can be introduced.
“These models are heavily post-trained to produce imagery or text that humans tend to prefer or tend to rate as more aesthetically pleasing,” Bohacek said. “That to me is problematic because we changed people’s likeness,” noting that both students were made to look thinner.
In an anonymous Substack titled “The Other Two,” the authors introduced themselves as the students pictured alongside Ramirez.
They wrote that they filed a report to the university’s Title VI office for discrimination and said they demanded that Stanford take down the banners with the photo.
“The fact that the picture generated one of our peers into a Black woman to showcase “diversity,” despite enrolling the lowest Black student population in the past recent years, has shown that universities have not shown enough institutional support for their Black community and see them as a tool for their marketing,” the authors wrote.
“To see Southeast Asian facial features be changed to adhere to the East Asian beauty standards shows that Stanford sees the Asia diaspora as a monolith,” they continued.
In an email to KQED, Stanford spokesperson Charlene Gage said that the university “reviewed the matter and confirmed that AI was used to alter the image in violation of the university policy.”
Gage said that Stanford removed the banners with the image in question and “are working to provide additional training for all staff and ensure proper review.”