Beyond White, Boy, and Blue: Exploring Prejudice and Dehumanization of Autistic People through Artificial Intelligence Generated Images

Background: Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing in its prominence and use in society, with an ability to “create” images, text, music, and video in short time frames, with relatively little cost. However, calling it generative is a misnomer given that it consumes what it is trained on and produces an amalgamation of what it has “learnt” meaning it often distills and reproduces societal biases meaning it is not only important to understand how generative AI constructs autistic people because of its prevalence, but also because it can teach us a considerable amount of social rhetoric and discourse about autistic people.Methods: We used neutral cues through Midjourney to generate 48 images with 51 targets and did two kinds of analysis. First, four independent coders did a content analysis based on a coding scheme, coding for race, gender, age, facial expressions, warmth, eye contact and presence of puzzle pieces. We chose these as the predominant stereotype is of autism as a childhood disorder that affects white boys. We then did a visual critical discourse analysis to breakdown the context, semiotics, and other information conveyed in the images for discourse about autism.Results: Autistic people were portrayed as sad figures, entirely white, despite neutral cues, almost entirely male presenting, often as children, with a high prevalence of puzzle pieces in the images. Through visual discourse analysis we highlighted that autistic people are often dehumanized, portrayed as lone figures unengaged with the world, and that often the only humanization comes from rare adjacent figures. Some of the images portray autism as violent disorder, or as death through decaying figures.Conclusions: The images which were generated repeat deep stereotypes and prejudice towards autistic people that are prominent in society. Importantly, given the freely available use of generative AI, it may represent a threat to the acceptance of autistic people.