{"slug": "darwin-racism-canva-and-ai", "title": "Darwin, Racism, Canva, and AI", "summary": "A student group at the State University of New York at New Paltz used a Canva-generated image depicting evolution as a linear progression from monkeys to a person of color to a white man, which the university's EvoS program director says illustrates implicit racist bias in AI-related technology. The image, which was the top result for \"evolution\" graphics on Canva, was vetted by multiple people before being used in a flyer for a club event, highlighting systemic racism in modern tools.", "body_md": "######\n[Race and Ethnicity](/us/basics/race-and-ethnicity)\n\n# Darwin, Racism, Canva, and AI\n\n## The new racism: A case study.\n\nPosted July 21, 2026\n[\nReviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.\n](/us/docs/editorial-process)\n\n### Key points\n\n- AI-related technology has been shown to include implicit racist messaging.\n- In this day and age, something as innocent as using Canva can lead to deeply offensive and racist products.\n- Here, I describe a situation, connected with Darwin, in which racist messaging inadvertently created upset.\n- Modern technology amplifies racist and sexist worldviews; exactly what the world does not need right now.\n\nHere is a story of something awful that happened last semester. I think we can all learn from it. I know that I did.\n\nAs Founding Director of the Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program at the State University of New York at New Paltz, over the past two decades, I have learned a lot. The centerpiece of this program is an interdisciplinary speaker series that helps to bring important insights regarding life to our campus and to the broader community. Past speakers have addressed topics such as law, medicine, [politics](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/politics), literature, art, disease, and more—with a consistent focus on how Darwin's big ideas can help to shed light on so many issues of the human condition. Generally, I am proud of this program, including its diversity and its consistent capacity for helping to bring about insights for so many students, professors, and others who have an interest in learning more about how Darwin's ideas continue to advance our understanding of all facets of life.\n\nAs an evolutionary scientist, I have heard rumblings over the years of racist bias connected with some evolutionary thinking. As a full-on political progressive and humanist, these rumblings have never sat well with me. The Darwin that I learned about was famously abolitionist in his worldview (Desmond & Moore, 2014). And the standard learnings that I had gotten on this issue have consistently portrayed *social Darwinism *as a set of misinterpretations of Darwin's ideas to advance often-racist social agendas (see Wilson, 2019). It turns out that there is more to the story.\n\nLast semester, an unprecedent-and-unfortunate situation took place. In an innocent, community-oriented effort to advertise a club event, a student group put out a flyer. Here is a snapshot from the flyer.\n\nThe number of people and offices who vetted this flyer was not insignificant. And this fact alone speaks to the implicit and systemic [racism](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/bias) that surrounds our culture.\n\n*Don't see it? Look more closely*. This image, generated by Canva, portrays evolution as a linear progression in a variant of what is called the \"March of Progress.\" While I don't use this kind of image in my own work, I simply didn't see how deeply problematic this image was until it was shown to me how glaringly wrong it is. Not only does the march of progress (\"lower\" beings evolving into \"higher\" beings) not really characterize how natural selection actually works (natural selection is blind to concepts such as \"lower\" or \"higher\"—it \"favors\" attributes that are relatively adaptive over other attributes in certain ecological conditions), but when portrayed in a certain way, the march of progress can be conspicuously racist and sexist.\n\nLook carefully at this image (which, at the time, was the #1 image that Canva produced on the prompting of \"evolution\" graphics). If you see *monkeys turning into apes turning into a person of color turning into a white man*, you would be seeing what I am now seeing. The second that a colleague of mine pointed this out, it became impossible to unsee. Of course, I felt terrible about the connotations—not to mention the fact that natural selection doesn't even work this way.\n\nAs renowned biologist Marlene Zuk (2010) pointed out clearly in her book * Sex and the Scala Naturae*, the march of progress concept is simply wrong. Evolution does not have a direction. There is no better or worse. Efforts to place people\n\n*above*other organisms are wildly misguided. Such efforts show a failed understanding of the process of natural selection. Further, efforts to create some kind of hierarchy with some groups of humans as\n\n*above*others, similarly show a lack of the basic logic that underlies natural selection. And such thinking can be profoundly dangerous.\n\nCanva, which includes all kinds of AI-based algorithms (vis a vis the Canva Magic Studio AI feature), has, to my mind, demonstrated very clearly how leaning on AI has the capacity to amplify racism and sexism. The fact that the #1 image (in the winter of 2026) for *evolution* within the Canva environment was so obviously racist and sexist speaks volumes about the fact that modern technologies, and AI in particular, have the capacity to foster a culture of racism and sexism.* As if that is what the world needs right now*.\n\nWhen the situation unfolded, the students who had used Canva to create that flyer sent a letter to the company several months ago, expressing concerns about the racism embedded in Canva content. Apparently, these students are still waiting for a reply back...\n\n## New Learnings\n\nI was one of several faculty and staff members (along with several students) who, unfortunately, did not catch a glaring error. And I have been consistently remorseful for not catching it sooner—I still feel pretty wretched about it—even today. That said, there were actually some important learnings that came from open dialog with colleagues about this issue. Such learnings (for me) include the following:\n\n**AI-generated content has been shown to lean toward racism and sexism**(c.f., Hofmann et al., 2024). This makes sense, unfortunately, as AI takes pre-existing content in its production of materials—and racist and sexist writings are steeped in what has been written by humans (largely by white male authors) across our checkered history.**As the world comes to lean more and more on AI and related technologies, we can only expect racist and sexist bias in written (and related) communications to become****more****prevalent.****When it comes to portraying evolution, the trope that is the march of progress is both inaccurate and dangerous.** I think that evolutionary scholars should fully do away with it.**Darwin himself wasn't fully innocent when it comes to issues of race**(e.g., several accounts of native peoples of South America that are described in*The Descent of Man*(Darwin, 1871) show indications of a racist worldview). This fact cannot be swept under the rug and I am happy to say that the EvoS program has plans to address this issue in upcoming programming.\n\n## Bottom Line\n\nNo matter where you stand politically, you likely would agree that the world is a mess right now.\n\nRacism has a deep and disturbing place in the broader human historical experience. Modern communication technologies that lean strongly on AI, such as Canva, have the capacity to (perhaps unwittingly) harness and amplify racist (and sexist) worldviews and communications.\n\n[Race and Ethnicity](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/race-and-ethnicity)Essential Reads\n\nAfter processing the aforementioned situation regarding how a naive use of Canva technology unwittingly led to highly offensive, racist, and sexist messaging regarding a well-intentioned student-led event, I have concluded that publishing a piece on this issue (while not easy) may help people to pause and consider possible unintentional racist and sexist messaging—messaging that seems to be embedded in the world of AI and that is seeping more and more into everything with each passing second.\n\nTo my mind, the last thing that we need right now is to amplify racist and sexist worldviews.\n\nAs I've written about extensively in prior publications, while modern technology may have all kinds of upsides, the underbelly of the modern technological revolution is nothing short of abhorrent.\n\nIt is up to all of us to be [mindful](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/mindfulness) of these issues when utilizing modern technologies and AI content—in an effort to stamp out racism and sexism. *Here is to a brighter future in which humans grab our own future by the reins. And not the robots. *\n\nNote: Thanks to Shannon Geher for her helpful editorial comments.\n\nReferences\n\nDarwin, C. R. (1871). The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. John Murray (publisher).\n\nDesmond, A., & Moore, (2014). Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. New York:: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.\n\nHofmann, V., Kalluri, P.R., Jurafsky, D. *et al.* AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect. *Nature* 633, 147–154 (2024). [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07856-5](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07856-5)\n\n[Wilson, D. S. (2019). This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution. Pantheon: New York.](http://https//www.amazon.com/This-View-Life-Completing-Revolution/dp/1101870206)\n\nZuk, M. (2010). Sex and the Scala Naturae. Presentation given at the annual EvoS Seminar Series. New Paltz, NY.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/darwin-racism-canva-and-ai", "canonical_source": "https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/darwins-subterranean-world/202607/darwin-racism-canva-and-ai", "published_at": "2026-07-21 23:19:18+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-21 23:33:57.998716+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["State University of New York at New Paltz", "Canva", "EvoS program", "Marlene Zuk"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/darwin-racism-canva-and-ai", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/darwin-racism-canva-and-ai.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/darwin-racism-canva-and-ai.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/darwin-racism-canva-and-ai.jsonld"}}