Aurora50, a startup DEI impact agency founded in 2020, serves as a catalyst for positive change in workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Striving to be recognized not only as real-life diversity champion but also as major influencer in the virtual world, this three-year-old startup faced the challenge of limited resources and reach.

However, the campaign "Fixing the bAIs," executed on a modest budget of 8772AED, the brand achieved unparalleled success by securing a staggering $4.4Million in earned media and reached an extensive audience of 4.4 billion people, showcasing the brand's ability to drive impactful change even with limited resources.

In the Middle East, the fight for women's equality in the workforce is at a critical point. Despite progress over the last half-century, female participation in the workforce is at only 25%, far below the global average of 50%. The gender gap is even more evident in leadership roles with men holding 96% of positions on corporate boards, as shown by the MSCI ACWI Index. The rise of Artificial Intelligence exacerbates this issue, reinforcing real life biases. UNESCO warns that AI is regressing decades of female progress, one prompt at a time.

Aurora50, a DEI impact agency founded in 2020, is addressing this challenge. As a catalyst for change in workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion, Aurora50 guides corporations towards more inclusive futures. They focus not just on real-world diversity but also aim to influence the virtual realm. Aurora50’s mission led to a significant initiative to fix AI biases using AI itself. Our campaign offered a solution to counteract female representation biases in AI, starting on digital platforms and expanding to reach global policymakers.

The campaign's influence was seismic gaining international recognition and influencing policies. It played a pivotal role in influencing 52 nations to adopt the EU’s first AI Act.

As a small Middle Eastern startup, Aurora50 stands as a testament to the power of not only transforming workplaces but also driving significant global societal changes and raising public awareness.

Aurora50, the GCC’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion impact agency, leads companies toward fairer workplaces and strives to be recognized not only as real-life diversity champions but also as major influencers in the virtual world, advocating for an equitable future.

In response, the campaign plays a crucial role in promoting gender equity in the virtual world of AI. By addressing biases in AI, it works towards a more balanced and inclusive representation in the digital world.

Fixing the bAIs uses AI to fix AI.

The campaign created a vast database of diverse and inclusive images, featuring women from various races, ages, body types, and professions, ensuring everyone is seen and valued in the digital world.

The primary objectives of the campaign were to actively counter gender bias in AI, foster awareness about the issue, and reshape societal perceptions to promote gender-equality.

It's not just a campaign; it's a catalyst for change.

We used AI to fix AI itself.

We turned the tables on AI using its own tools—Midjourney, DALL-E2, and Stable Diffusion. Crafting over 80,000 inclusive and diverse images of women, we injected diversity directly into AI's veins. Our website, fixingthebias.com, became the hub, disseminating these game-changing images to AI training datasets.

Beyond pixels, we educated youth through inclusive AI workshops and hosted summits on diversity. We didn't just address a problem but created a lifelong solution. With a global army of supporters, we birthed a perpetual community, a lifelong generator of images on our discord channel, dismantling AI bias, one prompt at a time.

This isn't just fixing; it's a revolution in every pixel.

Our campaign targeted influential figures—key figures in the AI industry, policymakers, AI developers, tech leaders, organisations, media, societal representatives - like KAY FIRTH-BUTTERFIELD World's First Chief AI Ethics Officer | Executive Director of governance of AI, and JANA NOVOHRADSKA UNESCO Representative | Gender Equality Rapporteur for AI, human rights, rule of law, who could spark meaningful change.

Operating across diverse platforms, from social media to open datasets, we sought to rectify biases within AI. Our campaign initiated a global conversation, grabbing their attention. Our approach involved generating thousands of inclusive images, strategically populating open datasets to reshape AI's perception of women in various professions

Notably, we actively participated in the only Plenary meeting of the Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAI), thematically linked to examining the draft Council of Europe [Framework] Convention on AI Rule of Law, which resulted in the EU's AI Act, which deems bias in datasets unacceptable.

The project launched on International Women's Day, 8th of March 2023.

Using AI image-generation tools, we built an extensive collection of diverse and inclusive images featuring women in various professions. We removed gender from their metadata (file names, tags, and descriptions) and added this powerful database to our website fixingthebias.com, catapulting these images to stock image banks, social media, and AI training datasets. Additionally, we created a lifelong Discord community that continuously uses Midjourney and generates images to fix the bias, one profession at a time. We have created more than 80,000 images and trained 9 datasets, including LAION-5B (world's largest dataset of 5.85 billion image-text pairs, the biggest openly accessible image-text dataset in the world and the primary dataset for AI image-generating tools such as Midjourney, DALL·E 2 and Stable Diffusion). Major stock image companies contribute by incorporating our images for free download.

Fixing the bAIs is being pointed out as a lasting solution to fix gender bias in AI at world summits and councils, such as the Council of Europe and CAI. Acknowledged by AI scientists at Ceimia and Mila (largest concentration of deep learning academic researchers globally), the project has inspired white papers affirming its significance. Campaign's impact extends to educational institutions worldwide. Ten months after its launch, the project contributed to passing of first regulation on Artificial Intelligence, the EU's AI Act, adopted by 52 countries at the EU parliament. Nine datasets, including Liaon 5B (the world's biggest openly accessible image-text dataset) have undergone training. We also set a World Record for the most pledges received for a gender equality in the workplace campaign in 24hrs. Aurora50 now stands as a global beacon of change, showcasing its ability to transform not just workplaces but also perceptions and policies worldwide.

The overall budget/cost for the campaign was: $ 2388.69 (8772.23 AED)

Domain purchase – $ 84.96 - (www.fixingthebAIs.com)

Hosting Server - $ 180 Hostgater -

Web Hosting - $ 1559.73

Discord - $ 564 - (https://discord.gg/9JyEDEGj)