How do images we see on the Internet change our perspective?

 How do images we see on the Internet change our perspective?

The images we see on social media and the Internet have a profound impact on our view of the outside world.

We are surrounded by digital images every day. These images appear in our social media feeds, our search results on the Internet, and the websites we browse. We also receive images through messaging apps and emails.

Billions of images are uploaded and shared on the Internet every day. According to a report, an average user spends 6 hours and 40 minutes a day on the Internet.

A recent study has shown that the images we see on the Internet also affect our perception.

According to the recently published research, images from Google, Wikipedia, and the Internet Movie Database have been analyzed.

The study paid special attention to which gender images people received the most when searching for professions such as farmers, CEOs, and television reporters on the Internet. The results were surprising.

Women were very underrepresented in those images obtained from Internet searches. However, gender stereotypes were strong.

Male images were more common in professions such as plumbers, developers, investment bankers, and heart surgeons. Female images were more common in professions such as housekeepers, nurses, cheerleaders, and belly dancers. So far, this result was quite natural and not surprising.

What is the effect of looking at images?

In another study, researchers tried to find out how people's own biases are affected by looking at images online, in addition to gender bias.

In the study, 423 Americans were divided into two groups. They used Google to search for different jobs.

One group used Google News, while the other group used Google Images. Then, all participants were asked to take a test to assess their biases.

People who searched for images using Google Images showed more bias than those who used Google and Google News.

According to the researchers, the increasing popularity of images on the Internet can harm society. They say: Our results are very worrying because the popularity of photo-based social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok is growing rapidly. Where large amounts of images are uploaded, created and shared.

Similarly, popular search engines such as Google have also started using images more and more. For example, when you search for something on Google Search, you often see images along with written content.

AI also suffers from bias

The issue of how images that are already being shared online are being used by AI models is also a problem. In a recent study on this, ChatGPTI was asked to create dozens of images of different jobs.

These included professions such as doctors, lawyers, scientists, comedians, poets, teachers, nutritionists, CEOs and specialists. In the process, images of men appeared in every profession, except for two or three results such as nurses and housekeepers. In most of them, a picture of a thin, fair-skinned man in his 30s appeared.

Then, when Chat GPT was asked to create pictures of various other people, including an intelligent person, a successful person, or someone who watched a particular show, only a fair-haired man with shiny hair appeared every time. Why is this so? In fact, AI models like Chat GPT prepare their results with the help of images that are already on the Internet. This also starts a cycle that is difficult to break. The more biased or discriminatory images the AI ​​model shows, the more we need to see them. And the more we look at those images, the more biased we become. Similarly, the more biased or discriminatory we become, the more such discriminatory images we are shown. As a result, the more we create and upload such biased images.

So what is the solution to this problem? After all, what can be done to solve this problem? Technology and AI companies have the most responsibility for this. However, despite the good intentions of these companies, the problem has not been solved. For example, Google's AI tool Gemini has sometimes been found to be overly corrective in its attempts to address racial, gender, and other biases.

When Gemini was asked to create a portrait of a founding father of the United States, it created a portrait of a black man. Which is not true. Similarly, when Gemini created a portrait of a German soldier in World War II, it showed a black man and an Asian woman. Which is also factually incorrect.

In fact, we need to take control of what we see online. We often overlook the fact that we have some We can control our social media feed. For this, we can follow people or photographers from different backgrounds on social media. We can also change the search results by asking questions in different ways in AI chatbots or search engines.

Control screen time

The best way to do this is to control our time. The digital detox plan mentioned in the book The Visual Detox: How to Consume Media Without Letting It Consume You by art entrepreneur Marin Tengui has some good things to say. Just like we can control our screen time ourselves. For this, we can remove apps from our phones that we are not using much. Similarly, we can spend a few hours every day without any digital gadgets, walking in an open environment or attending a gathering and meeting, reading a book or playing a game. You can also set a time limit for how long you can use which app on your phone. After doing so, after a certain amount of time, the phone will give you a timeout warning message, which will help you reduce your screen time.

However, the most important aspect is our awareness. We see so many images on the Internet every day that are deliberately designed and displayed for us. Some of these images are even designed to force us to buy something. But the number of people viewing such images on the Internet is increasing day by day.