Chanel’s second female CEO, Lina Nair, who has been working to increase gender diversity in the workplace, recently learned that ChatGPT OpenAI has a very different take on the aging luxury brand’s demographics.
Nair and her team visited Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., and spent time experimenting with ChatGPT, Nair said in an interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business’s “View from Above” last October.
“We say, ‘Show us a picture of Chanel’s senior management team visiting Microsoft’ — all people in suits,” she said.
Nair’s trip to Silicon Valley also included visits to Google and other tech firms — part of Chanel’s efforts to invest in artificial intelligence, including Lipscanner, an AI-powered app that lets users virtually try on lipstick, which it introduced in 2021. But she said the image created by ChatGPT to depict her team failed to take into account the composition of Chanel’s workforce, which is 76% female, including the company’s own. executive director. She added that 96% of the brand’s customers are also women.
“It was an all-male team, not even in fancy dress,” she said. “Like, come on. Is that what you have to offer?”
This was reported by the representative of OpenAI Fortune bias continues to be an important AI issue that the industry is dealing with. “We are constantly improving our models to reduce bias and mitigate harmful outcomes,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Fortune asked ChatGPT to create an image with the same Nair prompt, and it created an image of five women and three men who appeared to be white. Chanel did not immediately respond Fortunerequest for comment. Microsoft declined to comment.
Gender bias in AI and luxury
ChatGPT has a history of disparaging the women in leadership movement. A 2023 study by UCLA found that when ChatGPT and Alpaca, a large-language model (LLM) developed by Stanford University, were asked to write letters of recommendation for male and female candidates, they used words like “expert” and “integrity” to describe men, and “beauty” and “admiration” to describe women. LLMs also used to be more historically male-dominated, as doctors for men, and automatically attached the pronouns “he” and “his” to these professions.
More recently in 2024, a study conducted by the University of California, Berkeley found that ChatGPT exhibits a linguistic bias, more likely to respond with stereotypes, derogatory content or misunderstanding when users enter GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 using “non-standard” English variants with Indian, Irish and Jamaican dialects.
Nair said the integration of artificial intelligence into her company is non-negotiable, but plans to introduce measures to combat the biases and hallucinations that continue to plague the technology.
“AI is everywhere, yes, and it’s going to transform our world, so luxury has to interact with it. Chanel has to interact with it,” Nair said.
“It is very important that we maintain the ethics and integrity of what we do,” she added. “I talk to my friends in tech all the time, all the CEOs, saying, ‘Come on guys, you’ve got to make sure you’re integrating a humanistic way of thinking into AI.’
In April, the California Institute of the Arts and the Chanel Cultural Foundation announced the construction of a a first-of-its-kind arts center to provide students and faculty with artificial intelligence, machine learning and digital imaging resources, with construction slated to begin this fall.
The AI’s careful vetting process aligns with Nair’s previous work addressing gender disparities in her own workplace. Since she joined Chanel in 2021 — after 30 years at Unilever, where she rose to the position of chief human resources officer — Nair has increased the proportion of female executives at the company from 38% to more than 60%.
Nair’s role as global CEO breaks a long line of male executives who have led the company. Aside from Maureen Schieke, who served as Chanel’s first female global CEO from 2007 to 2016, no other woman besides Nair has held the title of chief executive in the brand’s 114-year history. Nair is also the company’s first Indian CEO. As the head of a company that often invokes the radical fashion ideology of its founder, designer Gabrielle Chanel, Nair is not shy about her desire to continue to deviate from Chanel’s long line of male executives.
“I was first in every job I did,” she said Wall Street Journal in 2023. “The first woman, the first brown person, the first Asian, the first Indian — but I don’t want to be the last.”
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A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on October 30, 2024.
This story was originally published on Fortune.com