If there’s one thing the marketing department at a big liberal arts or research university craves, it’s the appearance of pleasant, racially blind diversity: Groups of multicultural, multiracial students hanging out in camaraderie that can be used to imply the existence of campus as a safe space that exists as a paradise outside of America’s historical racial trauma and current abuses, such as its immigration enforcement apparatus. But getting actual images of your supposed paradise, as it exists in reality? Well, that can be a bit more tricky. There’s a long history of U.S. universities doctoring photos or creating composite images to make their student body look more politically correct in some fashion, creating images that can be used to appeal to specific demographics of would-be applicants. But in the era of generative AI, that process is now apparently as simple as just uploading an existing image of real, human students and telling a chatbot to race-swap them into the desired hues, something that California’s Stanford University admitted to this week.
“I love this school, but I don’t love when they do things like this,” <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/stanford-ai-policy-student-photo-race-swapping-22444142.php?fbclid=IwdGRjcAUgn_hjbGNrBSCf4nBkb2YFZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMzUwNjg1NTMxNzI4AAEeWWrudchcsTgyh57ayUNXTKa-uC5-PUqOUfpZXaP4SUCWKfSIriOPGIkGZvM_aem_eStEkeZEaMAdrPCMshfNWg&utm_campaign=mrf-facebook-SFChronicle&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&mrfcid=202609226ab2f2532db635028385b720″ rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>said student Billy Ramirez, a senior at Stanford majoring in human biology who found this week that an image of him taken in 2024 had been swapped to instead portray a fake Black woman instead. “It doesn’t reflect reality. It’s not as diverse as they make it out to be. It is Silicon Valley. I’m not as surprised given the culture of Stanford revolves heavily around AI usage.”
The original photo of Ramirez was taken by a university photographer in 2024 in a dining hall, during a celebration of the Lunar New Year. In it, Ramirez can be seen with two other students–a white male and an Asian woman–holding plates of noodles. That original photo was posted online by the Instagram account for Stanford’s dining services, in a post that has subsequently been deleted. The photo then disappeared for two years, until someone at Stanford apparently decided to grab it and run it through a generative AI program to create “Welcome Home” banners that were strung up all over campus. As Ramirez put it, “it’s all over campus, it’s the first thing you see when you walk in.” Only now, instead of Ramirez’ face, was the face of a nonexistent Black student. Simultaneously, the two other students in the photo had also been altered as well, making them appear thinner and more homogenized with some kind of fit, attractive student aesthetic. One wonders at the prompts being used here. Why not just claim that Tilly Norwood is enrolled at Stanford, while you’re at it?
Seriously, though: Imagine how you’d feel if a school photographer snapped your photo, and the school then decided to replace you in that photo with a “hotter,” idealized version of yourself to sell the school to others. Hell of a self-esteem booster there. Simultaneously, it represents the infuriatingly flippant treatment of an actual minority student (Ramirez is Hispanic), in the service of trying to make Stanford look more “diverse.” As he put it to theNew York Times, “to see me erased like that so easily was kind of very upsetting.”
The school, meanwhile, immediately lurched into damage control mode, removing the banners and scrubbing the image wherever it could online, and admitting fault without actually explaining the process behind how or why this happened. Instead, it simply said it would conduct “additional training” to avoid similar incidents in the future. It did, however, note that this imagery was clearly in violation of the university’s own AI policy: “Stanford’s A.I. policy is clear: The use of A.I. in producing or altering images of Stanford people, events, research, facilities or achievements is strictly prohibited. Both the alteration and lack of disclosure in this case violate that policy. We are working with Residential and Dining Enterprises to provide additional training and ensure proper review of all materials.”
As for the difficulty in putting together a real approximation of this photo of “Stanford student life,” one can understand why it has become more challenging in the last few years for the university PR department. Following the June 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the court effectively struck down affirmative action in college admissions, the percentage of the student body at Stanford identifying as Black has cratered. In the immediate first-year class of 2024-2025 following the Supreme Court decision, Black or African American enrollment at Stanford reportedly fell from almost 9% to just 4.5%. By the 2025-2026 academic year, that number was down to 3.6%, while during the same period Hispanic enrollment has also fallen from 16.7% to 12.4%.
Obviously, the Trump administration’s war on “DEI” and minority Americans in general to some degree restricts the options possessed by a university like Stanford in actually promoting the diversity in its student body it wishes to depict in its advertising. Stanford is also one of a series of colleges under a more intense microscope thanks to Trump administration Justice Department investigations, as the college’s medical school came under investigation for its admissions practices in June. But at the same time, nothing is stopping Stanford from say, investing more in college preparedness programs in minority or low-income communities, if it wants to try to reverse the slide in minority enrollment. But hey, those things cost money and take time and oversight! Why throw funds into entire programs of that nature, when you can just swap skin tones of the photos of students you already possess, or take a few pounds off those other students so it doesn’t look like they’ve been enjoying the noodles a bit too much?
In particular, studies have long shown that U.S. colleges value the appearance of Black enrollment more than they seem to value actual Black enrollees. A 2013 study from the Journal of Marketing for Higher Education found that, as in the Stanford case, Black students tended to be overly represented in images of the student body, while Hispanic students were notably underrepresented. The researchers conducting that study concluded that the pattern of imagery across numerous colleges suggested that “the consistency at which institutions of higher education presented misleading depictions of racial diversity leads us to the understanding that it is intentional and near universal. It is clear that racial diversity is being used as a commodity in the marketing of higher education and presenting an image of diversity is more important than accurately portraying the student body.”
As is so often the case in the age of generative AI, meanwhile, the story morphs to reflect the new ease and speed of a university–or a single university employee–making these decisions that can erase the images of existing students or dream up an imagined new reality to replace them. Such a thing once involved a whole marketing department; now it involves a few keystrokes and chatbot prompts, spitting out fake images of nonexistent students that are almost impossible for the average person to discern from reality. What is the end game here? Why even start from a real photo, if you’re planning to warp and change everyone in it? Will next year’s marketing materials just be purely AI-generated student thirst traps? The following image feels like the obvious place where this slippery slope eventually deposits us. Welcome to Stanford!
