Better Little People Pictures: Generative Creation of Demographically Diverse Anthropographics

We explore the potential of generative AI text-to-image models to help designers efficiently craft unique, representative, and demographically diverse anthropographics that visualize data about people. Currently, creating data-driven iconic images to represent individuals in a dataset often requires considerable design effort. Generative text-to-image models can streamline the process of creating these images, but risk perpetuating designer biases in addition to stereotypes latent in the models. In response, we outline a conceptual workflow for crafting anthropographic assets for visualizations, highlighting possible sources of risk and bias as well as opportunities for reflection and refinement by a human designer. Using an implementation of this workflow with Stable Diffusion and Google Colab, we illustrate a variety of new anthropographic designs that showcase the visual expressiveness and scalability of these generative approaches. Based on our experiments, we also identify challenges and research opportunities for new AI-enabled anthropographic visualization tools.