the ones they show which look exactly like the cover of half the bollywood movies ever made.

Almost certainly how they’re building up the data. But that’s more a consequence of tagging. Same reason you’ll get Marvel’s Iron Man when you ask an AI generator for “Draw me an iron man”. Not as though there’s a shortage of metallic-looking people in commercial media, but by keyword (and thanks to aggressive trademark enforcement) those terms are going to pull back a superabundance of a single common image.

imagine gong to an artist snd saying ‘I need s picture and almost nothing matters beside the fact the look indian’

I mean, the first thing that pops into my head is Mahatma Gandhi, and he wasn’t typically in a turbine. But he’s going to be tagged as “Gandhi” not “Indian”. You’re also very unlikely to get a young Gandhi, as there are far more pictures of him later in life.

Ask for an business man in delhi or an urdu shop keeper with an Elvis quiff if that’s what you want.

I remember when Google got into a whole bunch of trouble by deliberately engineering their prompts to be race blind. And, consequently, you could ask for “Picture of the Founding Fathers” or “Picture of Vikings” and get a variety of skin tones back.

So I don’t think this is foolproof either. Its more just how the engine generating the image is tuned. You could very easily get a bunch of English bankers when querying for “Business man in delhi”, depending on where and how the backlog of images are sources. And urdu shopkeeper will inevitably give you a bunch of convenience stores and open-air stalls in the background of every shot.

Indians can be Sikh, not all indians are Hindu