Artificial intelligence (AI) may now be able to do everything from creating images to providing answers to almost any question – but there is one area where it is stumped.

It struggles to imagine women as investors. When asked to create images of investors, AI tools overwhelmingly depicted men.

Even when asked to portray an investor with traditionally feminine characteristics – such as a skirt or painted nails – they still showed men, just with those features.

That’s according to trading and investment company eToro, which put AI platforms to the test. This is despite there being 6.7 million female investors in the UK – fewer than the 10 million male investors, but still a sizeable number.

eToro asked so-called ‘generative AI’ tools to create the images. The platforms use algorithms – a set of instructions designed to solve a problem – to create content such as text or pictures.

A user can type in a prompt, which may be a question or a description of what you want the tool to give you. For example, you may ask the AI tool to write a shopping list or to produce an image of a dog.

A man’s world: One of the images created by the artificial intelligence program

It then uses online sources – which could include photographs, books, news articles, journals and other internet material – to answer in a conversational tone or create an image based on what you requested.

But as it uses existing materials, the biases of its sources can creep into its responses to any requests.

When asked to produce an image of an ‘investor in a skirt’, three of the four images created by the AI tools were sharply dressed men in skirts. Only one was of a woman in a pencil skirt.

When the AI tools were asked to produce an image of an ‘investor with red fingernails’, all four pictures produced were of men in suits wearing red nail polish.

It was only when asked to produce a hyper-realistic ‘portrait of an investor in a dress’ did all four AI platforms finally show an image of a woman.

Unfortunately, some of these images show the investors wearing revealing clothing, while another woman wears a dress made from banknotes.

AI also assumes women are assistants to investors.

When AI was promoted to show ‘an investor with their assistant’, it created images of mostly middle-aged men in suits as the investor and women as their assistants.

Lale Akoner, global markets Analyst at eToro, says: ‘The misleading and harmful stereotype of the investor as a professional-looking man is sadly alive and well.

‘The results simply tell women they don’t belong.

‘This isn’t just an AI bias – it’s a societal issue holding back women financially.’

Depictions of investors in films, books and articles will be partly to blame as these sources are likely to be absorbed by AI tools.

Dr Ylva Baeckstrom, a former banker and now senior finance lecturer at King’s College London Business School, found male lead actors make up 76 per cent of the screen time allocated to lead roles in films about finance.

Even when asked to portray an investor with traditionally feminine characteristics – such as a skirt or painted nails – they still showed men, just with those features

The research, published by eToro, proves films mainly show men as the investor while women are depicted as wives, mistresses and assistants

When asked to produce a hyper-realistic ‘portrait of an investor in a dress’ the AI platforms finally showed an image of a woman – but she was wearing a dress made from banknotes

The research, published by eToro, proves films mainly show men as the investor while women are depicted as wives, mistresses and assistants.

It’s a worry as households are starting to turn to AI for financial information.

Dr Baeckstrom says women should question all of the information AI tools produce – and the first step in doing this is to become financially educated so you can analyse the information it gives you.

Plus, this will help spot what is called ‘AI hallucinations’, where tools answer using false or nonsensical information.

‘AI will make things up. You can’t know whether it’s true or not – you can’t trust it. If you’re a savvy user, you’re much more likely to benefit from it. You’ll question things,’ she says.

Finally, users must correct AI platforms if they produce a text or an image with these financial biases, Dr Baeckstrom says.

‘We have the opportunity with AI to start again without the biases. We need to teach AI that the blueprint of an investor is not a man.’

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