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