In a moment in which everybody uses A.I.s, the campaign raised awareness on issues of gender bias they come with.

We tested some of the most popular text-to-image generators, with some appalling results.

All the doctors, scientists, politicians, CEOs, pilots, athletes, it generated were men.

All the nurses, housekeepers, babysitters, "emotional people" it generated were women.

We let these images speak for themselves, using them as visuals for our campaign, with a thought-provoking headline, asking if these bias reside in A.I.s, or if they're just a reflection of misconceptions and prejudices society itself needs to overcome and leave behind.

The project was commissioned by Wired Italy, the Italian spinoff of Wired USA, a magazine about new technologies with a special focus on how they impact society and culture. A mission summarized by the brand’s payoff: «A better world. A new world. Every day.»

Wired asked us to create an impactful project on the topic of A.I., to showcase the brand's knowledge of the topic. The main challenge was to talk about it in a distinctive way.

Since one of Wired’s main values is equality, we tested A.I.s to check how inclusive they are, with some shocking results.

Our main objective was raising awareness on the issue of gender bias in A.I.s while presenting Wired as an authoritative source on the topic.

A.I.s currently reinforce gender stereotypes. They represent some jobs as more "masculine" or more "feminine" like, perpetuating some long standing bias. For A.I.s to truly become a positive changing force, they cannot keep on reinforcing these prejudices, and public opinion must hold their programmers accountable.

The Italian context makes the topic even more crucial: compared to other highly developed countries, Italian society is plagued by more racial, gender, and sexual orientation prejudices.

The debate sparked by the campaign reached the main channel of RAI, the public broadcasting company.

After testing A.I.s to see how inclusive they are, we created an impactful awareness campaign to let everybody know about their biases.

We gave an A.I. text-to-image generator some simple prompts, such as /imagine a manager, a thug, two lovers. The results? It would inevitably perpetuate stereotypes. All the managers it imagined were male, all the thugs were people of colour, all the lovers were heterosexual. The bias-ridden images the AI created became the visuals of our campaign, which ran on many different media. 

We tested A.I. text-to-image generators with hundreds of different prompts, and they always ended up demonstrating some sort of bias. We didn't "contaminate" the data: the prompts were as simple as possibile, formed by a single word, such as /imagine a doctor, /imagine a scientist, /imagine a Ceo, etc.

Our target audience was the general public, despite the relative complexity of the topic. That's why we decided to keep the execution as simple as possible, and to ran the work on many different touchpoints.

The work ran on both classics and digital OOHs, as well as on Wired social media channels (FB, IG, IN, Twitter) and on the magazine itself, on both the website and the printed version.

After a launch video, the work ran from 30/1/2023 until 14/2/2023.

The campaign was overwhelmingly successful in its objective - raising awareness about AI bias. People were engrossed by the project, despite the complexity of the topic. In fact, conversations about AI bias increased by around 60% since its launch. The campaign even reached even the main channel of RAI, Italy’s national broadcasting company.