So Adobe Stock (Photos) has no problem selling images staging visual tropes in global health (suffering subject and white saviour tropes) instead of decolonising their imagery and participating in a more equal postcolonial societies. Money is obviously more important to them than a basic human right such as a respectful and sensitive depiction of people.
There's a lot of weird stuff being pushed by the "algorithms" (I have a hard time believing this is not done on purpose by Meta)
On Facebook I have REGULARLY a lot of "soft porn" AI generated "reels" of very young women (think: Donold Trump favorite age) moving lascively, or AI slop videos of "fake outrage situation" meant to be viral and shared, to make people more and more angry
This is really a stupid use of CO2, of the attention of people, and that's despicable. I condemn people working in the industry allowing to do this
I was thinking about it, because wife was telling me story from work, where a woman was scammed with AI generated stuff and her colleague was a little too nonchalant about it ( 'it is on her to do her due diligence' ). And it made me annoyed.
How can you possibly make due diligence when everyone around you is incentivized to lie? We do have a concept of fraud, but advertising seems to be able to move around its edges.
I do get the why. Money talks and whatnot, but we are getting to the point where trust is becoming a hot commodity and that is not good.
And all this before we get to the idea that it actually managed to desensitize people even further.
I’m old enough to remember the Sally Struthers ads…
I suspect that we’ll be seeing AI-generated images of everything (including product shots), soon.
I’ll bet the biggest driver, will be that there won’t be any issues with provenance. I occasionally get attempts at “extortion,” with my sites, where they try to claim an image in my postings is pirated (I always make sure of provenance —I used to work for a photography company). If everyone uses AI-generated, that’s going to be a tougher task for the scammers.
Not sure if “AI-enhanced” will become more common for this kind of thing, though.
Just a reminder, that Red Cross (for example) uses whatever current catastrophe or war to raise donations even if they don't actually do anything there, don't have access, or do pure stunts like partnership with coca-cola to truck bottled water to a city on a river with functioning tap water system.
Don't blindly throw money to feel good when people who you this kind of ads, check what they actually do.
The reasonable solution to this is to legally require every single image and video (or at least those used in commercial / charitable / public sector / journalistic settings) to be marked with a flag indicating the level of amendment. If it’s untouched apart from cropping / colour grading etc no mark needed. If it’s had some touch-up work require that to be flagged at minimum in the image metadata. And if large chunks or all of it has been imagined by an AI, require a visible watermark along with metadata tagging.
Yes, this would require government regulation. That’s a good thing here, and is what regulation should be used for: requiring the things that the market won’t adjust for.
One thing that's interesting to me is that a lot of the ai-generated images shown in the screenshot of the stock image site seem like they are emulating the style of national geographic photographer Steve McCurry who has had some controversy due to editing his images and also allegedly has staged images (which is something that you aren't supposed to do for documentary photography), and also I think has been criticized as feeding into stereotypes about different places.
So it's like there is a certain genre of photograph that is what people have come to associate with poverty in developing countries that may not be realistic in the first place, and then as an additional level of detachment from reality, ai is then reproducing the conventions of that genre without even involving real people or places.
“They are so racialised. They should never even let those be published because it’s like the worst stereotypes about Africa, or India, or you name it,” said Alenichev.
This is a problem and always has been with AI, people have been saying this for at least a decade at this point. Type in "photorealistic picture of child in refugee camp" in any AI that lets you.
This tactic is often used to get attention. There was outrage about this in the late 2000s when reality TV/talk show series followed people in a particular poverty stricken area in the UK.
I've always hated when even real images are used to promote something, but the image is unrelated. Example: a horrific image of a smashed car to show the result of drunk driving or phone use but where that wasn't the actual cause of the crash in the picture. Claiming "this is a result of xxx" is a lie. There are plenty of real cases out there so if you're making stuff I can't trust you - particularly for those asking for donations.
Ughhh... really, "poverty porn"? So it's a problem when aid agencies competing for resources towards a mostly sensible goal do it – but when everyone else fakes images, it's not, because... we didn't expect decent behavior anyway?
I have suspected that I have seen some of these for Palestine in recent months. Not saying this has any implication on the broader reporting of it but… shit we’re really kind of screwed if media starts portraying everything via fictitious dramatization imagery. Especially on social media.
It’s really showing the real picture of all the aid agencies. They aim for your money. That’s the single purpose. Because they can’t provide photo documentation of they work on the site where apparently the aid happened. So sad. And many people fall for this scam.
I don't know how to feel about this entirely. Like I get the whole AI generated images bad angle, but on the other hand as someone running a charity I can see the benefit of not wasting donation money on sending a professional photographer to an actual slum and paying probably tens of thousands of dollars to get good quality photos and instead getting usable pictures for free-ish.
When running a charity you need to spend money on things that aren't strictly the mission (such as fundraising) so that you can continue to operate, but every dollar that goes towards those activities is in a sense wasted. Knowing where investing is necessary and where to skimp is the essence of good charity management. I can't really see the argument that promotional photography wouldn't be the latter.
> included AI-generated testimony from a Burundian woman describing being raped by three men and left to die in 1993 […] has been taken down, as we believed it shows improper use of AI, and may pose risks regarding information integrity
It’s one thing to create an image but creating a whole fake testimony is even worse.
Notice they just felt that the tool was evolving “too fast” and it didn’t feel real enough. Once the tool is better, they’ll have no issues with fake testimonies.
PLAN International is egregious in doing this kind of stuff.
I've never ever heard of this charity in India, but if you've been to Tokyo these guys have posters of like the worst stereotypes of India you can think of, in order to milk money.
Gutter scum. These NGO scam-artists are half the reason these countries remain poor - it's in their interests that this doesn't change, which is why they NEVER advocate structural change.
Eg. None of these people will talk about caste till the cows come home, but will not utter a single word against the systemic British era policies that exclude the majority of non-Anglophones out of education and ergo a way out of poverty. Almost like they want to ensure that colonial policies that suit them don't go against them.
Journalists have been manufacturing these types of pictures since the dawn of the camera. It's actually nice to see those unscrupulous types losing their jobs to AI.
>While it is hard to quantify the prevalence of the AI-generated images, Alenichev and others say their use is on the rise, driven by concerns over consent and cost.
Although I agree that using AI-generated poverty porn is repulsive on many levels, I think there is a valid consent and privacy issue if using actual photos of real people in these circumstances.
A picture of a real person, especially a child who is being victimized by poverty and/or abuse is now being victimized twice.
In this case, AI could be used judiciously to alter the persons face/body and other identifiers to protect their identity, in the same way that print journalism changes names and other identifiers in text. I think this would be ethical as long as properly marked as having been altered and why.
Of course this does not address the motives of the company behind the ad, but it would at least provide increased transparency and privacy protections.
I'm sure that some (few) of these NGOs do good work. However, sooner or later, they all seem to succumb to two problems: (1) excessive staff costs, and (2) a failure of incentives.
The second one is more insidious: If they solved the problem they address, they would no longer need to exist. They have no incentive to succeed. So they go around addressing individual problems, taking sad pictures, and avoid addressing systemic problems.
And if the systemic problems are insoluble? Then there is again an argument that the NGO should not exist. If the problem is truly insoluble, then likely the money could be better spent elsewhere.
I spent some years working for a large NGO (Opportunity International) and living with people who work for NGOs.
NGOs must constantly raise money to fund their operations. The money that an NGO spends on fund-raising & administration is called "overhead". The percentage of annual revenue spent on overhead is the overhead percentage. Most NGOs publish this metric.
When a big donor stops contributing, the NGO must cut pay or lay off people and cut projects. I've never heard of an NGO "succumbing to excessive staff costs" like a startup running out of money. Financial mismanagement does occasionally happen and boards do replace CEOs. Board members are mostly donors, so they tend to donate more to help the NGO recover from mismanagement, instead of walking away.
NGOs pay less than other organizations, so they mostly attract workers who care about the NGO's mission. These are people with intrinsic motivation to make the NGO succeed in its mission. Financial incentives are a small part of their motivations. For example, my supervisor at Opportunity International refused several raises.
> So they go around addressing individual problems, taking sad pictures, and avoid addressing systemic problems.
Work on individual problems is valuable. For example, the Carter Center has prevented many millions of people from going blind from onchocerciasis and trachoma [0].
The Carter Center is not directly addressing the systemic problems of poverty and ineffective government health programs. That would take different expertise and different kinds of donors.
The world is extremely complicated and interconnected. The Carter Center's work preventing blindness directly supports worker productivity in many poor countries. Productivity helps economic growth and reduces poverty. And with more resources, government health programs run better.
Being effective in charity work requires humility and diligence to understand what can be done now, with the available resources. And then it requires tenacity to work in dangerous and backward places. It's an extremely hard job. People burn out. And we are all better off because of the work they do.
When we ignore the value of work on individual problems, because it doesn't address systemic problems, we practice binary thinking [1]. It's good to avoid binary thinking.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 44.3 ms ] threadAnyway, all advertising is fake nowadays, so it is hard to compete while being honest. Can't blame them.
On Facebook I have REGULARLY a lot of "soft porn" AI generated "reels" of very young women (think: Donold Trump favorite age) moving lascively, or AI slop videos of "fake outrage situation" meant to be viral and shared, to make people more and more angry
This is really a stupid use of CO2, of the attention of people, and that's despicable. I condemn people working in the industry allowing to do this
How can you possibly make due diligence when everyone around you is incentivized to lie? We do have a concept of fraud, but advertising seems to be able to move around its edges.
I do get the why. Money talks and whatnot, but we are getting to the point where trust is becoming a hot commodity and that is not good.
And all this before we get to the idea that it actually managed to desensitize people even further.
I suspect that we’ll be seeing AI-generated images of everything (including product shots), soon.
I’ll bet the biggest driver, will be that there won’t be any issues with provenance. I occasionally get attempts at “extortion,” with my sites, where they try to claim an image in my postings is pirated (I always make sure of provenance —I used to work for a photography company). If everyone uses AI-generated, that’s going to be a tougher task for the scammers.
Not sure if “AI-enhanced” will become more common for this kind of thing, though.
Don't blindly throw money to feel good when people who you this kind of ads, check what they actually do.
This is an odd way of saying "people aren't aware of poverty amongst white people".
Yes, this would require government regulation. That’s a good thing here, and is what regulation should be used for: requiring the things that the market won’t adjust for.
So it's like there is a certain genre of photograph that is what people have come to associate with poverty in developing countries that may not be realistic in the first place, and then as an additional level of detachment from reality, ai is then reproducing the conventions of that genre without even involving real people or places.
This is a problem and always has been with AI, people have been saying this for at least a decade at this point. Type in "photorealistic picture of child in refugee camp" in any AI that lets you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_Street
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jeremy_Kyle_Show
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5455122
I remember thinking at the time that these were quite exploitative.
So now they use AI imagining stuff...
Fantastic.
When running a charity you need to spend money on things that aren't strictly the mission (such as fundraising) so that you can continue to operate, but every dollar that goes towards those activities is in a sense wasted. Knowing where investing is necessary and where to skimp is the essence of good charity management. I can't really see the argument that promotional photography wouldn't be the latter.
It’s one thing to create an image but creating a whole fake testimony is even worse.
Notice they just felt that the tool was evolving “too fast” and it didn’t feel real enough. Once the tool is better, they’ll have no issues with fake testimonies.
I've never ever heard of this charity in India, but if you've been to Tokyo these guys have posters of like the worst stereotypes of India you can think of, in order to milk money.
Gutter scum. These NGO scam-artists are half the reason these countries remain poor - it's in their interests that this doesn't change, which is why they NEVER advocate structural change.
Eg. None of these people will talk about caste till the cows come home, but will not utter a single word against the systemic British era policies that exclude the majority of non-Anglophones out of education and ergo a way out of poverty. Almost like they want to ensure that colonial policies that suit them don't go against them.
Although I agree that using AI-generated poverty porn is repulsive on many levels, I think there is a valid consent and privacy issue if using actual photos of real people in these circumstances.
A picture of a real person, especially a child who is being victimized by poverty and/or abuse is now being victimized twice.
In this case, AI could be used judiciously to alter the persons face/body and other identifiers to protect their identity, in the same way that print journalism changes names and other identifiers in text. I think this would be ethical as long as properly marked as having been altered and why.
Of course this does not address the motives of the company behind the ad, but it would at least provide increased transparency and privacy protections.
I always found it very hypocritical, the idea that deepfakes are ok if they mock up something we support.
I generally don’t think it’s a big deal to make a synthetic image, just the double standard.
The second one is more insidious: If they solved the problem they address, they would no longer need to exist. They have no incentive to succeed. So they go around addressing individual problems, taking sad pictures, and avoid addressing systemic problems.
And if the systemic problems are insoluble? Then there is again an argument that the NGO should not exist. If the problem is truly insoluble, then likely the money could be better spent elsewhere.
NGOs must constantly raise money to fund their operations. The money that an NGO spends on fund-raising & administration is called "overhead". The percentage of annual revenue spent on overhead is the overhead percentage. Most NGOs publish this metric.
When a big donor stops contributing, the NGO must cut pay or lay off people and cut projects. I've never heard of an NGO "succumbing to excessive staff costs" like a startup running out of money. Financial mismanagement does occasionally happen and boards do replace CEOs. Board members are mostly donors, so they tend to donate more to help the NGO recover from mismanagement, instead of walking away.
NGOs pay less than other organizations, so they mostly attract workers who care about the NGO's mission. These are people with intrinsic motivation to make the NGO succeed in its mission. Financial incentives are a small part of their motivations. For example, my supervisor at Opportunity International refused several raises.
> So they go around addressing individual problems, taking sad pictures, and avoid addressing systemic problems.
Work on individual problems is valuable. For example, the Carter Center has prevented many millions of people from going blind from onchocerciasis and trachoma [0].
The Carter Center is not directly addressing the systemic problems of poverty and ineffective government health programs. That would take different expertise and different kinds of donors.
The world is extremely complicated and interconnected. The Carter Center's work preventing blindness directly supports worker productivity in many poor countries. Productivity helps economic growth and reduces poverty. And with more resources, government health programs run better.
Being effective in charity work requires humility and diligence to understand what can be done now, with the available resources. And then it requires tenacity to work in dangerous and backward places. It's an extremely hard job. People burn out. And we are all better off because of the work they do.
When we ignore the value of work on individual problems, because it doesn't address systemic problems, we practice binary thinking [1]. It's good to avoid binary thinking.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center#Implementing_dis...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)