Stanford University has acknowledged that artificial intelligence was used to alter a promotional photograph of students, replacing one male student with a fictional Black woman and changing the appearance of two others.
The image was used by Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE) on “Welcome Home” banners displayed around the California campus. It was originally taken in a dining hall in 2024 and showed three students holding plates of food.
Billy Ramirez, one of the students in the original photograph, discovered the changes after a friend sent him a comparison of the two images. His likeness had been removed and replaced, while the faces of the other students appeared to have been digitally altered to make them look thinner.
Ramirez said the edits initially seemed absurd, but that he was upset by the decision to change his identity and remove him from an image intended to represent Stanford students.
The altered photograph was first reported by the student publication the Stanford Review before spreading across social media. The episode prompted criticism of the university’s use of synthetic images in campus marketing.
Stanford AI photo breached university policy
A Stanford spokesperson confirmed that the use of AI to alter the image breached the university’s own rules. Its communications guidance prohibits the creation or alteration of images depicting Stanford people, events, facilities or achievements when doing so could falsely represent reality.
The university’s policy also says that written permission should be obtained before using an individual’s name, image or likeness, including realistic AI-generated depictions or imitations.
The banners featuring the edited image were reportedly being removed from campus after the controversy emerged. Stanford has not publicly explained why the photograph was changed in the first place.
