MIND ALTERING IMAGES

How much time do you spend on the internet per day? Be honest. It’s more than you may be comfortable admitting to others, or yourself. The truth of the matter is though, that you aren’t alone. The average person spends approximately six hours and forty minutes online every day. South Africa is significantly above average in this regard. According to 2023 statistics, the average South African spends a whopping nine hours and 27 minutes online daily across multiple devices. It is estimated that we spend slightly more time on mobile devices at an average of five hours and 13 minutes a day versus the four hours and 25 minutes spent on computers. With so much time spent online, it calls into question what is actually being consumed and where. One of the most consumed forms of content is of course images and videos, which are predominantly viewed on social media. The content we consume has a substantial impact on how we view the world.

The influence of imagery can reaffirm certain biases, or plant the seed for new ones. This is also largely impacted by the amount of misinformation present on the web and the susceptible consumers. Such biases include the perpetuation of gender-based stereotypes, especially in the professional sphere. The scary part is that bias is not just limited to people, but AI too as it’s reliant on the consistency of the prompts it’s given. According to a recent study, “The more biased images AI models themselves spit out, the more we see; the more we see, the more implicitly biased we become ourselves.” According to the researchers, “The rise of images in popular internet culture may come at a critical social cost. Our findings are especially alarming given that image-based social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are surging in popularity, accelerating the mass production and circulation of images. In parallel, popular search engines such as Google are increasingly incorporating images into their core functionality, for example, by including images as a default part of text-based searches.” Throw AI modelling into the mix, and it becomes a perfect storm of confirmation bias not just from a gender perspective but in race too.

While a large percentage of the responsibility sits with the tech companies themselves in terms of the ethical development of AI and the modelling that is resultant from it, we are all responsible for the digital world that we create for ourselves too. We need to be discerning about the content that we expose ourselves too, as this in turn has an impact on the algorithm, that supplies our feeds thereafter, or better yet, limit your time online altogether.