How do we stop AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images?

Researchers like Arsenii Alenichev are correctly identifying a new wave of “poverty porn 2.0,” where artificial intelligence is used to generate stereotypical, racialized images of suffering—the very tropes many of us have worked for decades to banish.

The alarms are valid.

The images are harmful.

But I am deeply concerned that in our rush to condemn the new technology, we are misdiagnosing the cause.

The problem is not the tool.

The problem is the user.

The NGO-industrial complex?

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/12/o...

Yeah, of course. But that's the imperfect best we've been able to do as societies to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable. Unless you think we should just let people die when there is a disaster or a catastrophe that is overwhelming?

The problem is the tool.

To suggest otherwise is to suggest anyone should be able to buy nuclear weapons which on their own do nothing.

Bad actors can only leverage what exists. All the benefits and harms comes from the existence of those tools so it’s a good idea to consider if making such things makes the world better or worse.

We might want to treat two things differently when for one of them, its only function is unimaginably massive destruction and for the other it’s to produce words and images.

This assumes 'we' (ie societies) are in a position to stop it - whether that's nuclear weapons or AI. If we are not, then what can be usefully done is going to shift… by a lot.

We've seen a hollowing out of the state in the core under neoliberalism which on one hand is out-and-out austerity and the other half is the inability to execute which Ezra Klein talks about it.

In the same time period we've seen donor organizations like the Gates Foundation pursue a model where NGOs pick and choose a few state functions that they'd like to take over in the periphery. This bypassing of the state gets things done in the short term but in the long term it doesn't help countries develop the state capacity to do things themselves.

My radical proposal is that third world countries develop and tax their economy to provide the services that their people want and that those governments should be accountable to those people. However the NGO-industrial complex is part of the same tendency that erodes state capacity in both the core and periphery.

Structurally the problem at hand won't go away unless NGOs get past the model of showing people poverty porn to make them donate or believe in the legitimacy of the NGO. In the end they could send a photographer out to a refugee camp to make very similar images that are real and if you think those fake images are harmful the real images are too.

Treating them differently based on the harm they cause, is still judging them based on the harm they cause rather than treating them as a neutral entity.

> This assumes 'we' (ie societies) are in a position to stop it

There’s major advantages to understanding the world as it is independent anything else. People make tradeoffs around harm all the time, pretending it doesn’t exist is pointless.

We can mitigate harm from earthquakes and blizzards independently from our ability to prevent such events. That comes from understanding such events as more than just acts of gods who would happily use other means should we try to mitigate the harm from earthquakes etc.

I don’t think it makes any sense to ignore the immediate consequences of using/abusing a tool when trying to determine the nature of any regulations or other curbs around that tool.