Chanel CEO Leena Nair Surprised as ChatGPT Imagines Her Team As All Men, OpenAI Responds

Leena Nair, Chanel's global CEO and the brand's second female leader has called out OpenAI's ChatGPT for producing a gender-biased image that inaccurately depicted the company's leadership team. Nair and her team visited Microsoft's Redmond headquarters and experimented with ChatGPT, she shared in a Stanford Graduate School of Business interview last October. "We're like, 'Show us a picture of a senior leadership team from Chanel visiting Microsoft'—it is all men in suits," she said.

The image generated by ChatGPT to represent her team didn't reflect Chanel's workforce, which is 76% women, including the CEO. She also pointed out that 96% of Chanel's customers are women. "It was a 100% male team, not even in fashionable clothes," she said. "Like, come on. This is what you've got to offer?"

The incident happened as Chanel expands its AI efforts, including Lipscanner, a 2021 app that lets users virtually try on lipstick. 

Gender Bias in AI

An OpenAI spokesperson acknowledged that bias remains a significant challenge in artificial intelligence, stating, "We are continuously iterating on our models to reduce bias and mitigate harmful outputs."

ChatGPT has previously shown biases in depicting women in leadership roles. A 2023 UCLA study found that when asked to write recommendation letters, ChatGPT and Stanford's Alpaca model used words like "expert" and "integrity" for men, and "beauty" and "delight" for women. LLMs also tend to associate historically male-dominated professions, like doctors, with men, and default to masculine pronouns.

A 2024 study led by the University of California, Berkeley, found that ChatGPT exhibits linguistic biases, responding with stereotyping, demeaning content, or lack of comprehension when prompted with nonstandard English variations, including Indian, Irish, and Jamaican dialects, using GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 models.

Who is Leena Nair?

Leena Nair is the global CEO of Chanel, the iconic French luxury fashion house. She was appointed to the role in December 2021, becoming the first woman and the first person of Indian origin to lead the company.

Before joining Chanel, Nair had a long career at Unilever, where she served as the Chief Human Resources Officer. She was known for her focus on people-centric leadership and was one of the youngest CHROs in Unilever's history.

Born in India, Nair studied engineering at Walchand College of Engineering and earned her MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur.