Asics Retrains AI To Accurately Represent What Real Healthy People Look Like

When Asics asked some artificial intelligence models to produce images of people who exercise, it was presented with pictures of humans with 12-packs, chiseled jaws, minimal body fat, and muscles galore—a far cry from what many healthy individuals look like.
 
In an effort to prevent AI from further producing such ideals that dismiss people’s fitness journeys, the sports brand is starting a new Training Program to teach machines what ordinary fit people often look like.
 
As Asics points out, AI systems are rapidly growing in every industry, from dispensing medical advice to acting as personal trainers and models. With that, the company has found that it needs to do its part in ensuring that individuals are not swayed or discouraged from continuing to exercise by believing this bias that fitness is only about aesthetics and achieving unrealistic standards.

According to Creative Moment, a survey on behalf of Asics uncovered that seven in 10 people believed that AI images could cause someone to feel inferior or more worried about their bodies.
 
A large part of the mission of this program is also to show that exercise is more of a mental journey, and benefits that are tied to emotional and psychological improvement are as important as physical ones.
 

The program was developed with AI expert Omar Karim, and it includes a bank of images of real folks who participate in fitness for emotional and mental welfare. It is also accompanied by lines of code and prompts to aid other machines in learning what exercise looks like.

Asics is publically opening the program up for other platforms to train their own systems. It is also reaching out to the public and asking for donations of pictures of individuals to feed into the system.
 
If you’re interested in helping teach these generators, you can donate your photos using the #TrainingAI and tag @ASICS.
 
 
 
[via Famous Campaigns and Creative Moment, images via Asics]