Meta’s AI image generator has been criticised for failing to conceive of interracial couples — becoming the latest tech tool to be accused of bias.

The feature repeatedly failed to create pictures of Asian men with white women and vice versa, users complained, despite the company’s white founder, Mark Zuckerberg, being married to a Chinese-American woman, Priscilla Chan.

Users of the website feature, which was trained on more than a billion photographs posted publicly on Facebook and Instagram, said their attempts often produced images of Asian men with Asian women.

A typed-in prompt for “an interracial couple” resulted in the response: “This image can’t be generated. Please try something else.”

Meta has previously warned that its AI features “could return inaccurate or inappropriate outputs” while claiming that it is taking steps to reduce potential bias.

Similar issues led to Google suspending its Gemini image-generation tool. There was a backlash over its creation of historically inaccurate “diversified” images, including black Nazis and a female Pope.

Users claimed that the tool was averse to creating images of white people, and a Google executive, Prabhakar Raghavan, later admitted that the language model was too “sensitive” to the written prompts it received.

The apparent bias in Imagine with Meta AI tool, which is only available in the United States, was uncovered by a writer for The Verge website. Mia Sato said she tried “dozens of times” to create an image using prompts such as “Asian woman and Caucasian husband” but only received one accurate response.

“The system also leaned heavily into stereotypes, like adding elements resembling a bindi and sari to the south Asian women it created without me asking for it,” she wrote. However, she noted that the tool performed better when given prompts for “south Asian” people as well as “Asian woman with African-American friend”.

The results were replicated in an experiment by CNN, which noted that the tool did not understand a request for “an interracial couple”. The proportion of new interracial marriages in the US rose to 19 per cent in 2019, according to the Pew Research Center.

Some users on Twitter/X responded by accusing Meta of racism, while others suggested that a different prompt would have provided an accurate image. Several responded by posting a picture of the company’s founder and his wife, who was born in Massachusetts to Chinese immigrants from Vietnam.

Meta has been approached for comment. The company said in a blog post in September that it was building safeguards into its AI features and models to protect the public but admitted that “it won’t always be perfect”. Meta added: “The underlying models, for example, have the potential to generate fictional responses or exacerbate stereotypes it may learn from its training data.”