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Stanford University Acknowledged Using AI to Alter Student Photo for Campus Banners, Replacing Hispanic Student With Black Woman

4 news reports Synced from source · record last edited 24 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Synthetic media generation technology developers and Synthetic image generation technology developers and deployed by Universities, Synthetic media creators and 3 others allegedly harmed University students, Two unnamed Stanford University students whose appearances were altered and 5 others.

Risk domain
Not classified
Occurred
Coverage
4 reportsSep 2026

What happened

Stanford University acknowledged using AI to alter a 2024 student photograph for campus banners in September 2026. The altered image replaced Hispanic student Billy Ramirez with a Black woman and made two other students appear thinner. Ramirez said being "erased" was upsetting and frustrating. Stanford said the alteration and lack of disclosure violated its AI policy and later said it was removing the banners.

Laws that address this harm

No recorded instrument yet addresses this use case where it happened. See the open queue.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (4)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Stanford R&DE Uses AI to Race Swap Students for Advertising
    stanfordreview.org · Garret Molloy, Zayd Patel
  2. Stanford Used A.I. to Swap Black Student for Hispanic Student in a Photo
    nytimes.com · Alan Blinder
  3. Stanford violated its AI policy by turning a Hispanic student into a fake Black woman in ad
    sfchronicle.com · Roland Li
  4. University confirms use of AI-edited photo amid controversy
    stanforddaily.com · Daniel Xu, Kaleb Gjestson

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
University students Two unnamed Stanford University students whose appearances were altered Students Privacy Epistemic integrity Educational communities Billy Ramirez

AI systems implicated

Synthetic media generation technologySynthetic image generation technology

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

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Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.

Other incidents involving Universities

Source record: incident #1708 on the AI Incident Database · all 4 reports