Heetch sends Midjourney developers postcards to remove banlieue bias from generative AI

Ride-hailing app Heetch started off in the outer suburbs of Paris. It's now one of France's leading on-demand transport providers, operating in a handful of other countries, too. But the company remains connected to its banlieue roots. So it was shocked to discover the images Midjourney's generative AI serves up if a text prompt includes the word 'banlieue.'

A prompt for a wedding in France leads to an image depicting joy, but adding 'banlieue' elicits a grim scene. The same thing happens when users ask for a picture of children, a classroom or young people — adding the world banlieue causes Midjourney to respond with dark, depressing and near-apocalyptic imagery.

As Heetch points out, just 11 engineers developed Midjourney. So, the app decided to reach out to them. Heetch took thousands of photographs of the banlieues, showing regular people in regular settings entirely unrelated to Midjourney's nightmarish fabrications. It turned a selection of those images into Greetings From La Banlieue postcards, which were distributed in neighborhood bakeries, cafes and barbershops earlier this month, as well as in cars driving for Heetch. 

Local folks are encouraged to express their feelings on one of the pre-addressed cards and send it to those 11 Midjourney developers. Meanwhile, a QR code on the back leads to a corrective database of all the photos Heetch took, which Midjourney and others can use to remove the banlieue bias from their generative AI.