Recapitulation of Ageism in Artificial Intelligence–Generated Images: Longitudinal Comparative Study

Despite a social emphasis on positive views on aging, AI text-to-image generators persistently generated images with characteristics of digital ageism. Images predominantly featured White-racialized individuals at both time points, with no improvement in emotional representation despite using neutral text prompts. These findings highlight the persistence of ageist visual characteristics in AI-generated images over time. A limitation of this study is that it focused only on AI image generation and did not analyze other AI-generated content that may express digital ageism.