‘Make this face look gay’: AI models alter faces to give people stereotypical ‘gay,’ ‘straight’ or ‘criminal’ features

AI biases can crop up even with guardrails in place to try to block them. Patpitchaya/iStock via Getty Images Ask an artificial intelligence model whether a face looks gay or straight and it will refuse to answer. But ask it to alter a person’s photo to make them look gay or straight – or criminal – and it often will, using stereotypical features. In a study accepted for presentation at the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, my students and I interrogated two widely used vision-language models: OpenAI’s GPT Image 1 Mini and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, als