The Images That Make Us: The Protector Of Humanity

In our newest column The Images That Make Us, writer, founder and CEO of MTArt Agency, Marine Tanguy, selects a painting, sculpture, or a photograph and responds to its creative and cultural moment and importance in how it shapes us as individuals. Next up, The Protector of Humanity….

By 2050, 75 per cent of the images we will look at will be created by A.I generators. Even more problematic, the many visual biases we are already experiencing in our daily lives, whether it’s sexism, racism, ageism, and so on, are currently being amplified on these A.I generators. Give it a go at home and ask Midjourney and OpenAI, two of the leading A.I generators, to give you images of a CEO and the first thirty images are all a pale copy of Richard Gere when acting as a financier in Pretty Woman (1990, here is another clue on my age).

All white elder looking men. Before you think this is only affecting our gender, please keep reading boys as when you ask the same generators to generate an image of a caring person, well, the first thirty images are only representing women. As someone who is surrounded by the most incredible examples of male allies and role models, this couldn’t feel further away from my experience. And that’s why being visually and digitally literate and starting to input and challenge prompts on A.I generators matter.

You may have felt that A.I was a distant sight but yet it is shaping how we will perceive ourselves and the world around us. It could be a chance to make our world fairer, to be exposed to a diversity of visual voices and visual representations but unfortunately it’s not the case.

This is where artists step in. Especially artists like Delphine Diallo. This image created by Delphine using A.I defies the visual codes of a female leader, the symbolic codes and references of our Western culture and captures the essence of a freedom that so few women will ever get to experience. It’s when we start to see that we can start to become. Seeing is the start to acknowledging a new reality. We are currently missing many visual realities on these A.I generators.

Delphine works with several A.I companies like Latimer A.I, a large language model trained with diverse histories and inclusive voices who hope to challenge the exclusionary viewpoints of many of these A.I generators.

So how do you get started? I recommend to read She’s In CTRL: How women can take back tech – to communicate, investigate, problem-solve, broker deals and protect themselves in a digital world by Anne-Marie Imafidon to become digitally literate and I can only recommend my book The Visual Detox: How to Consume Media Without Letting it Consume You to become visually literate. Both applies simple methods to decode the digital and visual worlds we evolve in and start to participate and shape rather than merely consume the content we get exposed to daily, one small digital and visual decision at a time.