this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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Fuck AI
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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.
Sure, but the youtube videos made by putting a bunch of poverty porn into a blender is inherently on the side of the system, not the exploited. There’s not a way to remove the voices of the oppressed from the conversation in a non-oppressive way. The idea that you’re doing it ‘for their own good’ doesn’t change what’s actually happening: the use of poverty porn at the exclusion of the voices of those affected.