The ‘poverty porn’ dilemma is solved. A Canadian charity recently made this bold claim about a new series of adverts they had produced, in which images were generated by AI rather than using photos of beneficiaries.
In my last Third Sector column, I wrote about how very little changes in fundraising and we keep trying to fix the same problems with very similar solutions.
Poverty porn is one of those perennial challenges that has defied a solution for the best part of 40 years.
A report into Live Aid described tensions between fundraising and service delivery over images used and stories told that are very familiar today.
On the face of it, this AI-driven initiative looks like a case of doing things differently and making progress.
But I’m not so sure.
First, it hasn’t solved the poverty porn dilemma (or ‘avoided’ it, to use the charity’s words). Many of the issues around saviourism, othering and stereotyping remain inherent in the images, irrespective of whether they show real beneficiaries, actors or avatars created by CGI.
Second, it introduces new ethical dilemmas.*
By removing real people from the discourse, it risks further dehumanising beneficiaries by suggesting we can deal with issues that affect them without the need to encounter their lives.
AI doesn’t create out of thin air, but needs to draw on existing data. If data (including images and stories) about beneficiaries is already skewed by saviourism, othering and stereotyping, then AI images that build from them are likely to be similarly contaminated, unless carefully programmed out.
Despite these new ethical challenges, the reception to this initiative has been almost universally – and uncritically – welcoming.
This brings me back to that question about why things don’t change: we don’t always think critically enough about issues.
Not only does this mean that we might not come up with new solutions; it also lets us slip into binary thinking that polarises the debate.
Perhaps the best illustration of this is the gulf between advocates of donor-centred (DCF) and community-centric (CCF) fundraising.
For years almost everyone said DCF was the way you ought to do fundraising. Hardly anyone challenged this orthodoxy. Then along came CCF with its critique that DCF reinforces donors’ power and privilege.
Vu Le, founder of CCF, famously said there are “no both sides” to the issue.
And I’ve lost track of the number of conversations I’ve had with advocates of DCF who totally dismiss the CCF critique as only being relevant to very wealthy philanthropists and having little say about mainstream fundraising.
Or they say the two are equally valid and compatible alternatives – let CCF people do what they do and we’ll carry on doing what we do.
CCF is forcing people to rethink what they have been doing for years, and many don’t want to do this, preferring to put up the shutters and convince themselves the challenge doesn’t exist.
But if we had been continually critically reflecting on our practices, we might not have been forced to suddenly confront them, with the defensive reaction this provokes.
In ethics, almost nothing is so cut and dried, so obviously right or wrong, so black or white, that we can say we have a definitive solution to a dilemma, with nothing further to learn from alternative solutions.
That’s why we call ethical dilemmas ‘grey’ areas; because they are not black or white.
So if we want things to change and not just go on as they have been doing, nor polarise into conflicting camps, we need more critical reflection.
We need to critically reflect on our own practices and ideas to pre-empt future ethical challenges, as DCF should have done at least at some point in the past 25 years.
And we also need to critically reflect on new solutions when they come along, even if – especially if – they chime with what we already (want to) believe.
Those innovations might be a way forward, but they’re probably not the definitive solution. And they almost certainly have bugs in the system that need to be ironed out.
Ian MacQuillin is director of the fundraising think tank Rogare
*Credit is due to Jess Crombie and Cherian Koshy for these insights.