By manifest-media, adgully, impactonnet,
Artificial Intelligence is often perceived as a neutral system that simply processes information and generates responses. However, AI does not create knowledge in isolation. It learns from the internet, which reflects human history, culture, and, unfortunately, our biases.
In recent years, conversations around bias in AI have become increasingly visible. Researchers, technologists, and media alike have noted that generative systems can unintentionally mirror long-standing stereotypes. As generative AI tools become more widely used for image creation, these biases quietly manifest in the results. A simple prompt like “generate an image of a nurse” often produces images of women. Ask for a CEO and the results overwhelmingly lean toward men. What may appear subtle at first reveals how easily historical patterns can be carried forward into new technologies.
For those working in advertising and creative industries, this observation carries particular weight. Agencies are not only storytellers but also contributors to the cultural imagery that shapes public perception. As a creative collective that actively participates in shaping modern visual culture, the team at 21N78E Creative Labs felt a responsibility to contribute in whatever way they could.
“Even though we were aware of the bias, our understanding of it took a sharp turn when we saw its extent in image generation. That’s when we realised the impact of what we had thought of was far wider. From that moment onwards, it became our sole mission to kickstart this initiative,” said Neeraj Rajeev, Senior Copywriter at 21N78E Creative Labs.
This realisation led to the creation of UnbAIsed, a gender-neutral AI image library designed to challenge these patterns. Launched around International Women’s Day, the initiative aims to build a freely accessible visual library featuring people represented beyond traditional stereotypes, showing diversity across professions, roles, and everyday life.
“At 21N78E, we’ve always believed that technology should be a mirror of our progress, not our prejudices. AI is an incredible tool, but it lacks the lived experience to know when it’s repeating an old mistake. With UnbAIsed, we aren’t just building a library; we’re attempting to give AI a better set of memories to learn from. It’s our way of ensuring that the digital future remains as diverse and nuanced as the real world we live in,” said Sudhir Nair, Founder and CEO, 21N78E Creative Labs.
More importantly, the project is designed as an open, collaborative effort. Students, creators, and brands across the country are invited to contribute gender-neutral AI-generated images with clear tagging to help expand the repository and influence the visual datasets AI learns from.
“The challenge with generative AI isn’t just the output; it’s the data loops that reinforce it. By building UnbAIsed, we’re moving from passive users to active contributors in the model-training ecosystem. We’ve utilised Gemini for the architecture and OSS generation models to seed the library, but the goal is to create a cleaner, more diverse dataset that ‘un-teaches’ the systemic biases found in older, unrefined crawls. It’s about leveraging the right tech stack to ensure the visual intelligence of tomorrow is built on a more accurate representation of today,” said Nikhil Shahane, COO.
By making the archive open and free to use, the initiative hopes to gradually reshape how AI interprets prompts. Most AI image models are trained on vast datasets of images collected from the internet. The patterns, roles, and representations within those datasets directly influence how AI visualises the world. When those datasets are skewed, the outputs become skewed as well.
UnbAIsed aims to introduce alternative visual references into that ecosystem; images that challenge stereotypes and present people beyond traditional roles. If such images begin circulating widely and become part of future training datasets, they could influence how the next generation of AI models learn to represent the world. In that sense, the initiative is not just about building a repository today; it could spark a chain reaction that contributes to a more balanced visual future for AI.
“As creators, we use images to build worlds, but if our AI tools only show us a world of the past, we’re limited in what we can imagine for the future. UnbAIsed is our way of adding more inclusive, honest colors to that digital palette. It’s about ensuring that when we look into the AI mirror, we see a reflection that is as diverse and nuanced as the reality we live in every day,” added Viren Mahendra, National Creative Director.
The key takeaway is simple: if AI learns from us, then improving what it learns from is a responsibility we all share. Through collective contribution and conscious curation, UnbAIsed hopes to ensure that the images AI generates tomorrow reflect a more balanced and inclusive reality.
