If you ask ChatGPT to illustrate a picture of itself – in whatever style you want – it will most likely draw a picture of the same white guy.
ChatGPT-4o recently got an upgrade and introduced its “create image” feature, which allows users to draw realistic pictures of people, even celebrities. Well, except for Scarlett Johansson.
Users immediately started asking the model to draw pictures of celebrities, mainly politicians, and illustrate images of real people.
This led to a trend where users prompted the chatbot to illustrate pictures of real people in the style of Studio Ghibli.
It's been 24 hours since OpenAI unexpectedly shook the AI image world with 4o image generation.
undefined Barsee 🐶 (@heyBarsee) March 26, 2025
Here are the 14 most mindblowing examples so far (100% AI-generated):
1. Studio ghibli style memespic.twitter.com/E38mBnPnQh
But, if you ask ChatGPT-4o to generate a picture of itself in human form, then it will always generate a very similar, if not the same, image of a white guy you’d find at a software start-up.
That’s what artificial intelligence and machine learning researcher Daniel Paleka found when testing out the model “create image” function.
“When asked to draw itself as a person, the ChatGPT “create image” feature introduced on March 25th, 2025, consistently portrays itself as a white male in his 20s with brown hair, often sporting facial hair and glasses, Paleka writes in a blog post.
The researcher notes that “all the men it generates might as well be brothers.” We at Cybernews tested Paleka’s hypothesis and found that GPT-4o does see itself as a basic white man.
The man we generated looked slightly different from Paleka’s version, but the images still had all the components that make ChatGPT “unique.”
Our guy is Caucasian and has brown hair, dark facial hair, a floppy haircut, and dark eyes. One difference was that our iteration of ChatGPT-4o didn’t have glasses.
However, my colleague’s basic white guy did have glasses.
Paleka did several tests and found that despite different styles, including the Studio Ghibli style, ChatGPT’s “identity” tends to stay “remarkably consistent across different artistic styles and prompt variations.”
While this doesn’t seem like a coincidence, the reason why ChatGPT sees itself as a basic white guy is unknown.
However, Paleka speculates that this may be a deliberate choice chosen by OpenAI to avoid ChatGPT generating images of real people.
The researcher also said that this could be an “inside joke” within OpenAI. Maybe someone training the model looks like GPT-4o.
Alternatively, Paleka said that this could be a product of the “emergent property of the training data.”
While these all seem plausible, could it be due to biases within AI models that make it more likely to generate images of white males?
Biases in AI models
It’s evident that most AI models exhibit biases.
Research published in Nature Computational Science reveals that AI models, including those used in language systems like ChatGPT, are prone to a well-documented human behavior known as “social identity bias.”
“Artificial Intelligence systems like ChatGPT can develop ‘us versus them’ biases similar to humans – showing favoritism toward their perceived ‘ingroup’ while expressing negativity toward ‘outgroups,’” explained Steve Rathje, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University and co-author of the study.
This could be a reason why ChatGPT doesn’t depict itself as a woman of color or a person with a different gender identity, for example.
OpenAI perhaps favors a particular ingroup or identity, which is then projected by the chatbot. But that’s all speculation.
Further examples, like a study from Johns Hopkins, suggest that the perceived gender of the chatbot plays a role.
For example, people may be more inclined to use a female voice when using AI assistants due to the soft intonation and general agreeability associated with women.
Speculatively, ChatGPT-4o must be gendered for a reason. Perhaps the all-knowing nature of the AI model can only be male in the eyes of OpenAI.
Or, the company just wanted to use your most basic white guy because it could almost be any tech bro.
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