Our hypothetical AI won't make any decisions. It just makes sketches as described and approved by witnesses. The relevant racism here is the one any witnesses may have, that's true even with a human police sketch artist.
"as described" according to what? There is simply no way to create image from words without something closely resembling decisions. Maybe "it" won't "make" those decisions, but they will be made somewhere.
Yea, somebody will have to evaluate whether the image matches the word, and that is currently done by the witnesses themselves. How is it worse than the current state?
In the racism-as-individual-intentional-malice framework sure. But I'm a consequentialist on this one. If it causes disparate & unjust outcomes mediated by perceived race then describing it as racist makes sense. No intent necessary.
No one is arguing that the AI has some sort of intentional racism and inherent real intelligence - they aren't trying to anthropomorphize it.
The argument is that the output is racially discriminatory for a variety of reasons and it's easier to just say "it's racist" than "Many of the datasets that AI is trained on under- or over-represent many ethnic groups" and then dive into the details there.