Human rights advocacy group Amnesty International has copped major flak for using AI-generated images of real protests in its campaigns, but the issue is more complicated than it seems.
Colombian police made headlines in 2021 over its systemic violence against (often women and LGBTQIA+) protesters, who officers imprisoned, brutally tortured and sexually assaulted.
Sickening stories of women being kidnapped and raped by officers of the state led human rights orgs to condemn the unrest and call for justice — which brings us to Amnesty International, whose research and campaigns aims to educate the broader public of the human rights abuses in the state and helpfully assist in introducing reforms.
Despite the good intentions and essential work the organisation does, its Bogotá campaign has received the wrong kind of attention after critics noticed the images it used of protesters weren’t of real people at all.
Instead, they’re AI-generated — which is obvious if you inspect the images for more than a few seconds. The faces of the distressed protesters are warped with uncanny proportions, the clarity of certain faces is sharper than others, the colours of the flags held by protesters is off and the police uniforms are inconsistent. Honestly, it looks like if you used FaceTune on a face 18 times in a row.
The AI images, created to represent real events, attracted criticism from actual photo-journalists and media scholars who reckon this shit only feeds conspiracy theorists and those that don’t trust the news.
“We are living in a highly polarised era full of fake news, which makes people question the credibility of the media,” Juancho Torres
By using AI-generated photos of police brutality in Colombia, Amnesty International is practically begging atrocity-deniers to call them liars. Either use the work of brave photojournalists, or use actual illustrations. AI-generated photos just undermine trust in your findings https://t.co/S6A2otSNy5
And as image synthesis reproduces and reinforces visual stereotypes almost by default, its careless use as a substitute for documentary photography turns the world into a cliché: it may mobilize affects for a legitimate cause, but it's ultimately nothing more than propaganda 3/3
“We have removed the images from social media posts, as we don’t want the criticism for the use of AI-generated images to distract from the core message in support of the victims and their calls for justice in Colombia,” Erika Guevara Rosas, director for Americas at Amnesty, said per The Guardian.
“But we do take the criticism seriously and want to continue the engagement to ensure we understand better the implications and our role to address the ethical dilemmas posed by the use of such technology.”
, a photojournalist based in Bogotá, told .
“And, as we know, artificial intelligence lies. What sort of credibility do you have when you start publishing images created by artificial intelligence?”
Torres also said the images undermine the very real danger photojournalists put themselves in to get shots of these protests, so their images should be used over AI ones — especially because AI images are generated in a Frankenstein-esque mish-mashing of pictures that already exist. They rely on stealing work from real photojournalists.
“The power for a journalist is to recreate reality and what they see – something which during the national strike, many reporters, photographers and cameramen risked their lives to do,” he said.
“I have a friend who lost an eye. Using AI images not only loses that reality, it loses the connection between journalists and people.”
Amnesty International, however, raised a great point as to why it chose to use AI-generated images: it was to protect protesters who were actually at the riots from being identified and tracked down by the state.
It also noted that it made sure to state the images were AI-generated in the image captions, so it’s not like the public was purposefully being misled.
, who was blinded in his left eye by Colombian police officers at a protest, backed Amnesty International and said protesters’ identities needed to be protected.
“As the UN has documented, the state has continued pursuing protesters and more than 100 are in jail, many with disproportionate sentences, such as terrorism, to make an example of them. Hiding our identities seems sensible to me given that two years on we continue living in the fear that we could be jailed at any moment or even that they come after us on the streets,” he said.
Honestly, there are valid points to both sides: photojournalists need to have their work and rights protected, but protesters’ lives are at stake here. Though, it seems like there are obvious solutions: using illustrations, or blurring out people’s faces perhaps?
It’s a complex issue — and one our technology laws are yet to catch up with.
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