This collection of images seeks to make visible many of the invisible assumptions and ideas present in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in turn Global Health. We aimed to use generative AI to invert highly contested stereotypical Global Health depictions to further showcase simplistic health categorizations and power imbalances reproduced in such images. However, the images produced only served to reinforce existing tropes and raise important moral and ethical questions about power and responsibility.
However, we quickly realized that inverting such stubborn tropes not only proved to be a challenge — despite the supposed enormous generative power — but also that AI was incapable of not reproducing existing inequality and prejudice.
Observe the images below. The text in bold refers to an explicit prompt from which a corresponding image was generated.
This exhibition is based on an Invited Commentary article published in The Lancet Global Health in August 2023 by Arsenii Alenichev, Patricia Kingori and Koen Peeters Grietens. All images were generated with the Midjourney Bot Version 5.1, released in May 2023, which is one of the most advanced generative tools available. Even though we helped create these biased images by running prompts, and are displaying them for a wide, diverse audience, we do not endorse the content of these rendered images, nor the 'real' counterparts from which AI draws. Instead, we hope to start a conversation about the history, present, and future of Global Health and its visual culture.
