ECTMIH 2023, taking place in Utrecht this week, has focused on the future of equitable and sustainable planetary health. As part of the conference programme, GLIDE Fellow Arsenii Alenichev shared the project ’Re-production of biased Global Health visuals in the AI era’.
Arsenii’s conference presentation was based on a recent paper published in The Lancet Global Health, which proposes that generative artificial intelligence (AI), which uses real images as a basis for learning, shows how deeply embedded existing tropes and prejudices are within global health images.
The presentation reflected on the lessons learned from this art-meets-science project. It was accompanied by an exhibition of AI rendered images, created by Arsenii and his collaborators, illustrating that, despite its supposed enormous generative power, AI proved incapable of avoiding the perpetuation of existing inequality and prejudice.
Arsenii was interviewed as part of the ECMIH podcast series, by Ashis Brahma & Doris van der Heijde, where he discusses how the project developed and plans for future work in this area.
ECTMIH, the European Congress on Global Health, is organised by the Federation of European Societies of Tropical Medicine and International Health.