--- title: "ChatGPT Messes Up Badly During Demo With CEO of Chanel" description: "Chanel CEO Leena Nair was baffled after ChatGPT was instructed to generate a photo of the fashion brand's senior leadership." date: "2024-11-02" modified: "2024-11-02" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-demo-ceo-chanel" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "OpenAI" tags: - "chatgpt" - "generative ai" - "OpenAI" - "the digest" --- # ChatGPT Messes Up Badly During Demo With CEO of Chanel ![Chanel CEO Leena Nair was baffled after ChatGPT was instructed to generate a photo of the fashion brand's senior leadership.]() *INDIA - JUNE 19: Leena Nair, Executive Director of Hindustan Lever Limited in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India ( for IT Woman Magazine ) (Photo by Shriya Patil/The The India Today Group via Getty Images) \Image: Shriya Patil/The The India Today Group via Getty Images\* ## Glass Ceiling Is [ChatGPT]() a little close-minded, a little old-fashioned in its thinking? Ask Chanel CEO Leena Nair, who was left disappointed — if not insulted — after she got to experiment with the [OpenAI]() chatbot during her visit to Microsoft's headquarters in Seattle. Nair, who is the second female global CEO in the iconic fashion house's nearly 115-year history, recalls how she gave ChatGPT a fairly softball image prompt — only for it to screw up badly. "We're like, 'Show us a picture of a senior leadership team from Chanel visiting Microsoft,'" she said in an interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, [as quoted by *Fortune*](). The result? It was "all men in suits," she recalled. That'd be a mistake at any big corporation, but it's a particularly egregious one to make for Chanel, a brand that mostly caters to women and was founded by one: Coco Chanel, one of the most famous fashion designers in history. You'd think ChatGPT would've scraped a Wikipedia article on that. "This is Chanel," Nair asserted [in the interview](). "76 percent of my organization is women. 96 percent of my clients are women. Female CEO," she added, pointing to herself. "It was a 100 percent male team, not even in fashionable clothes," she roasted. "Like, come on. This is what you've got to offer?" ## AI Gaze Despite what Elon Musk and his ilk of culture warriors might say — that ChatGPT is "[woke]()," or whatever — a [wide body]() of [research]() and [embarrassing debacles]() have demonstrated that generative AI models frequently produce [racist and sexist outputs](). Some of the [half-baked attempts]() to put guardrails against this have only heightened the obviousness of their shortcomings. The problem is that AI models are mostly a product of [what they're trained on]() — the [internet](), replete with repulsive content — and therefore reinforce the same biases that humans hold. When the tech bears the image of being some impartial, superintelligent arbiter of reality, being presented with its overtly sexualized depictions of women, for example, can be whiplash-inducing. That being said, Nair is a believer in AI, and says that Chanel has been working on getting "AI-ready." But she's ardent that the tech needs to be designed with "ethics and integrity" in mind. "I constantly talk to my friends in tech, all the CEOs, saying, 'Come on, guys, you gotta make sure that you're integrating a humanistic way of thinking in AI,'" Nair said, per *Fortune*. For now, though, we'd suggest that "AI industry" and "ethics" is a bit of an oxymoron. **More on AI:** *[Mark Zuckerberg Pledges to Fill Facebook With Even More AI Slop]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()