What’s Your Dream Vacation?
Summer all the time?
Ever wondered what someone else’s dream vacation is? For me personally, it tends to be somewhere tropical, preferably where I can get some sun and enjoy the beach. Turns out, to my surprise, that so is (apparently) everyone else’s… at least based on the AI-generated images to my prompt “dream vacation” on Craiyon. All pictures provided by the algorithm clearly refer to beaches/tropical paradises. It is interesting to think that although many people would envision other types of vacation (perhaps hiking in the mountains or skiing in the winter), the algorithm has been trained with data that immediately correlates vacation with summer and beach. However, after a quick Google search of the word vacation, the outcome is similar in that most associated keywords and images displayed relate to summer and tropical destinations. When did our view of what constitutes a dream vacation became so narrow?
Super interesting Isa! I thought this type of AI would help us be creative and think outside of the box, but your results perhaps suggest that the outputs are actually biased by what’s most popular. Maybe this is not the best tool to think outside the box or to get imaginative about vacation ideas!
Yes. I noticed the same thing, Isabella. Craiyon definitelty leverages a lot on exisitng popular search results, so the outputs are skewed towards that. I wonder how they determine the variability between the 9 different outputs in the grid. Perhaps they could improve the diversity of outputs by increasing this variability factor up a notch. This may then lead to more creative outputs from Craiyon!
This is quite interesting! I wonder if things would be any different if you tried ‘holiday’ or ‘time off’ and it’ll all show people relaxing on a beach! I feel like when we think about these in our head – it’s almost a beach vacation that we all dream for? or at least the majority of us? Looks like AI is then doing a good job haha
Exactly what i pictured too when i read the title (not that this is my personal preference but that this will acutally come up), also interesting that it always includes white femals in a bikini..
That was really interesting Isabella! As mentioned in the comments before, I’m very surprised that the 9 output fields exclusively show beach vacations. Considering the already quite sophisticated capabilities of this AI system, I would have expected slightly more variety or at least a distinction between summer and winter holidays. However, I agree with Nthato that Craiyon probably leverages a lot on exisitng popular search results which in turns leads to skewed output results. Nevertheless, I am surprised that they did not fix this issue yet since this seems rather easy to me. I guess there are just bigger things to care about such as the faces for instance.
I love it, Isa! I was thinking about this given some of my dream vacation destinations (Egypt, Argentina). I was wondering if the prevalence and use of generative AI will lead to less diversity of thought. I.e. people start moving towards the same ideas for vacations. I think we’re all more susceptible to suggestions than we might believe…
I wondered if anything changes with personal searches one does so I typed in vacation into Google as well.. but I got the same pictures of water, beach and sun (even if my perfect vacation and stuff I search for are more linked with mountains and hiking…) wonder if the search is bespoke by location (i.e. US vs Europe vs. Asia)? cannot be such a blank view for everything and everyone… or can it?!