Stanford used AI to replace Latino student with Black student in promotional photo

Stanford University acknowledged this week that it used artificial intelligence to alter a promotional photo, swapping out a Latino student for an AI-generated Black woman and slimming down two of his classmates — the latest episode to raise questions about how universities market diversity, and one that lands amid mounting federal scrutiny of Stanford’s own record on race.

The doctored image was first flagged by the Stanford Review, an independent student publication, which published side-by-side comparisons showing Billy Ramirez and two classmates in a 2024 photo. When the image resurfaced on banners around campus this month, Mr. Ramirez had vanished, replaced by a woman of a different race and gender, while the two students beside him appeared visibly thinner than in the original shot.

Mr. Ramirez told the student paper the experience left him feeling silenced and erased from a representation that was supposed to include him.

A Stanford spokeswoman confirmed to Straight Arrow News that the alteration violated university policy, saying the school is working with its Residential and Dining Enterprises division to provide additional staff training. Stanford’s AI guidelines explicitly bar the creation of “synthetic media depicting real individuals” without consent and prohibit AI-generated content that “falsely depicts Stanford people” without disclosure.

The mishap is not the first time a university has been caught digitally engineering the appearance of diversity. In 2000, the University of Wisconsin at Madison admitted it had inserted a Black student into an all-white crowd photo for an admissions booklet cover, prompting officials to recall roughly half of the 110,000 copies they had printed — a reprinting effort contemporary news accounts put at about $64,000.

Stanford’s latest stumble also comes as the university faces heightened federal pressure over race-conscious practices. The Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into Stanford’s medical school admissions in March, requesting data on the last seven years of admitted classes alongside similar probes of Ohio State and UC San Diego. The following month, the Education Department opened a separate Title VI inquiry into a Stanford teacher-certification cohort limited to educators who “identify as a person of color,” a program the university has since begun winding down.

Mr. Ramirez said he learned about the altered banner from a friend rather than from the university and questioned whether the AI-generated image reflected Stanford’s actual student body.