Aurora50 fixed AI's gender bias by feeding it a corrected image bank

MIT and UNESCO research cited by the campaign found that AI image generators picture 97% of professionals as men — a hidden bias that would harden workplace inequality into the future being built by AI.

Aurora50, a UAE diversity and inclusion impact agency, decided to fix the bias at its source. It used AI itself — Midjourney, DALL·E 2 and Stable Diffusion — to generate over 80,000 images of women in professions from doctor to CEO, then removed gender markers from the metadata so the correction would not be filtered out.

The images were published on fixingthebias.com and disseminated to stock banks, social feeds and nine open datasets used to train AI, including LAION-5B. A global community on Discord keeps generating new images, turning the fix into a perpetual pipeline rather than a one-off file dump.

The campaign reached an estimated 4.4 billion people and earned $4.5 million in media, set a record for pledges to a gender-equality workplace initiative in 24 hours, and was cited as a benchmark at the Council of Europe and by AI labs Mila and Ceimia.

Fix biased AI by manufacturing better training data

Injecting the images into open training datasets fixes every model built on them.

Stripping gender from metadata keeps the correction invisible to filters.

The Discord community keeps the dataset growing, so the fix outlives the campaign.

Open publication let regulators and researchers cite it as evidence for policy.

When the machine inherits a bias, don't just protest the owners: build the missing counter-examples and inject them into the training stream. A corrected open dataset outlives any campaign film.

The campaign contributed to the adoption of the EU AI Act, the first regulation to deem bias in datasets unacceptable, passed by 52 countries, and it is used as a benchmark for fixing gender bias in AI at world summits. It also collected honors: a Shorty Awards gold and bronze, an Epica shortlist, and Campaign of the Year (MEA) at the 2024 New York Festivals AME Awards.