Legitimate aid groups chase the taillights of the Facebook inspo-slop merchants who have been blessing your older relatives’ feeds with “photos” of sad-eyed African village children making luxury cars out of plastic bottles and war veterans angling for reposts on their 100th birthday.
I honestly don’t know if i find it better or worse to use image generators for this.
Showcasing the effects of poverty without having to watch an actual human suffering doesn’t seem the worst thing.
Long term, maybe it becomes easier to dismiss these things if theyre known not to be real photos? But maybe its always visceral, or everyone knows that is still what it really looks like.
Generating enough images to get something useful is cheaper than flying photgraphers out - lower overheads for charitable groups should actually have benefits, unlike cost savings for corporations.
It feels extra disengenuous to use ai here, but I dont know that my feelings are what’s most important in this particular example.
I normally beat the anti-AI drum anyway, but I don’t consider this an ethical use of AI. The way to avoid exploiting people by making poverty porn is to just not make the poverty porn to begin with, not to use image generators trained on all the poverty porn that’s been made in the past. Even without a specific victim, the underlying problem of stereotyped portrayal while removing the voices of the people actually affected remains unchanged.
Maybe the problem isn’t actually youtube videos, but a global system of violence and control that profits directly from hungry, exploitable people.
Once you start making fake images of social evils, even with the best of intentions, you are compromised. After all, why not look at your analytics and juice the prompts to make the campaign work better? And soon the images diverge from the real problems you’re supposedly trying to solve and into the realm of lurid fantasy, presenting an exaggerated and simplified vision of the problem that pushes emotional buttons harder than realistic reportage would. From then on, the die is cast. If things improve, surely it’s better to keep making images of them being worse than ever, as after all, it’s good to have cash reserves just in case. And given how good a job you’ve done with that, surely you deserve a bonus. The computer-generated sad-eyes shantytown urchins wouldn’t want it any other way.
You gotta realize that the other side has absolutely no qualms about using these methods. Trump is literally releasing videos of himself pooping on protesters.
If we really want to fight poverty and injustice, then we shouldn’t be tied to some imaginary “AI” morality. We should use every means necessary.
give locally
That’s a fine general principle but some places around the world have very little, and no one locally to give rich-westerner levels of resources.
Giving not-locally can make way more of a difference in more people’s lives.
https://givingmultiplier.org/invite/OLOGIES
This organization lets you donate to someplace locally, and pairs it with a remote organization that provides way more benefit for the dollar.
If you use specific codes, it adds a little extra as well. This one is the link through the Ologies podcast.
when your local community is well enough that it no longer needs a hand out, you can then spread your local further
What is “well enough?”
If $100 locally can help 3 people survive but $100 globally helps 30-300 people survive, when is it the right time to stop giving locally?
“Give locally” is quite and has some truth, but there is nuance it excludes.
Good point. $100 in the Philippines is a shitload of money. My wife’s ex-husband took a large group (12 people I think?) of her friends and family out to a nice seafood restaurant. $50 tab, including a generous tip.
But there’s something to be said about raising yourself up before you can help others.
