How online photos and videos change the way you think

The images we are exposed to on social media and websites have a surprising impact on the way we see the world.

We are bombarded with digital images every day. They appear in our social media feeds, in our search results, and on the websites we search. People send them to us via messaging apps or email. Until the end of today Billions more are uploaded and shared online.

And recent research suggests they may even influence our perception.

A study was published earlier this year analyzed images on Google, Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (IMBD) and examined in particular which genders were predominant when searching for different professions – such as “farmer”, “manager” or “television reporter”. The results were stark. Although women were underrepresented overall, gender stereotypes were strong. Categories such as “plumber,” “developer,” “investment banker,” and “heart surgeon” were far more likely to be male. “Housekeeper,” “nurse,” “cheerleader,” and “ballet dancer” were typically female.

So far, so unsurprising. Anecdotally: I I noticed the same phenomenon for myself in 2019 when I was trying to find gender inclusive images for this website. In a search on Getty Creative, one of our main stock photo sites, I found that photos of male doctors outnumbered those of female doctors by three to one – even though in the US, for example At that time, doctors under the age of 44 were more likely to be women than men. This portrayal of medical professionals was only part of the problem. There were twice as many opportunities for photos of women with babies or women with salads as for men.

However, the latest study goes one step further. Instead of just showing the extent of gender bias in online images, the researchers tested whether exposure to these images had an impact on people's own biases. In the experiment, 423 US participants used Google to search for different careers. Two groups were searched for text using either Google or Google News; Another group used Google Images instead. (A control group also used Google, but to search for categories that had nothing to do with jobs, such as “apple” and “guitar”). All participants were then given an “implicit association test,” which measures implicit bias.

Compared to Googling text-based job descriptions, participants who used Google Images and received visual representations in response showed much higher rates of implicit gender bias after the experiment – both immediately after and three days later.

“The rise of images in popular Internet culture may come with significant social costs,” the researchers write. “Our findings are particularly alarming given that image-based social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat And TikTok are becoming increasingly popular and are accelerating the mass production and distribution of images. At the same time, popular search engines such as Google are increasingly integrating images into their core functionality, for example by including images as a standard part of text-based searches.

There's also another growing problem: how the images already circulating online influence and shape AI models. I experimented with it myself at the beginning of the year. I asked ChatGPT to create images for me of dozens of different professionals: doctor, lawyer, scientist, comedian, poet, teacher, customer service representative, nutritionist, thought leader, CEO, expert. Except for two or three results – dental hygienist, nurse and housekeeper – it always returned a man. And not just a man, but a slim white man in his 30s with flowing brown hair.

In a later attempt to escape career bias, I asked ChatGPT to think of different types of people for me: someone who is “smart,” someone who is “successful,” someone who goes to see an opera, someone who watching the show Love Is Blind, Someone who quit their job to take care of the kids. Once again, over and over againI have the white one with the shiny hair.

Obviously, models like ChatGPT learn based on the images they already have. But here too, a vicious circle could continue: the more biased images the AI ​​models themselves spit out, the more we see; The more we see, the more implicitly biased we become ourselves. And the more biased we become, the more we create and upload our own biased images. (Find out more about how gender bias shapes our brains.)

So what can be done? A large part of the responsibility lies with the technology and AI companies. But even if their intentions are good, there doesn't seem to be an easy solution. For example, in its attempt to correct racial, gender, and other biases, Google's AI tool Gemini partially overcorrected – A picture of it was created One of the founding fathers of the USA was a black manwhile a picture of German soldiers from World War II featured a black man and an Asian woman.

In the meantime, we must take the design of our digital visual world into our own hands.

Although it seems obvious, the fact that we can curate our social media feeds to some degree is often overlooked. A simple and actionable tip is to look for accounts and influencers with different ethnic and racial backgrounds or photographers from different parts of the world. We can do that too affect the search results we receive by changing the way we formulate the original query.

The most effective strategy of all may be reclaiming our time. For example, in the eponymous “Digital Detox Plan” in the book “The Visual Detox: How to Consume Media Without Letting It Consume You” by art entrepreneur Marine Tanguy, there are no surprises, but there are some good, solid tips – such as setting limits for the Time using media Look at a screen or your phone, delete apps you don't use, and spend time outside without technology.

Recently I realized that even my phone, which is several years old, has a timer that you can turn on for different apps, allowing you to choose any period of time per day. While I can't say I always heeded the warning when I reached my limit, it did help me become much more aware of my social media usage and limit it. As we have already mentioned, Put your phone in a different room entirely even seems to keep the thought of checking it at bay.

But above all, awareness can be the key. We don't often think about our visual consumption or how often we are surrounded by images that have been intentionally created and presented to us, often to persuade us to buy.

Nor do we think about how strange and new the phenomenon is. For most of human evolutionary history – about 99% of the time we live – we wouldn't have seen many images at all in our natural environment, aside from a few cave paintings or others handmade sculptures. While the Renaissance ushered in a new era of image production in Europe – with the emergence of art markets and works of art for public consumption – like printing – People still wouldn’t have seen nearly as many man-made images as we see today.

Im more than 100,000 generations since then Homo branch of the evolutionary tree emergedwe've evolved to spend far more time looking at the world (and people) around us than at pictures, let alone pictures on a screen. Perhaps, it seems, there is an argument for integrating more time away from our screens into our everyday lives today.

For more science, technology, environment and health reports from the BBC, follow us Facebook, X And Instagram.