![]() ![]() It may yet be of use to the organization’s mission: Both parties agreed that Barros’ AI portraits could be used in the Grandmothers’ promotional material.īarros has hopes that his project might do some good amid decades of often fruitless search. The organization reached out to Barros and published a joint statement clarifying that IAbuelas is just an AI art project.ĭespite the project’s limits, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo appreciated the spirit behind IAbuelas. These important limitations at first worried the Grandmothers, said Goncalves Granada, as they were concerned the IAbuelas portraits would be misconstrued for real photos. ![]() “For example, making everyone very thin … I’m working to make the images more diverse, more representative of what Argentines truly are.” “The app tends to show hegemonic portraits,” Barros said. Generative AI’s limitations are clearly displayed in IAbuela’s renditions, which are not representative of Argentina’s ethnic diversity nor of the imperfections that come with age. If the tech hasn’t been trained with Latin American faces, for example, it will show Caucasian or Asian faces.” “Because Midjourney and other technologies have their own idea of what faces look like. “And it still wouldn’t be a scientifically accurate representation,” said Reyes. However, to reach a certain level of accuracy, AI tools must be trained on at least 50 photos of the same person taken at around the same time - something the Grandmothers’ archive does not contain. Biometric data - such as the length or thickness of an eyebrow, the shape of a nose or mouth - can be obtained through photos, said Reyes. IAbuelas/InstagramĮven if splicing the photos of two parents could recreate an image close to what their children would look like, there are often not enough photos of the parents. The images are made by splicing photos of the child’s parents with Midjourney, a generative AI tool, and then applying an aging filter. In these cases, Barros publishes two AI-generated images: one of a woman and the other of a man. The military took the children so soon after birth that the gender of many babies could not be verified by the parents before they were abducted. Generative AI, however, is not ready to join their search, Manuel Reyes, independent developer and generative AI consultant, told Rest of World.Ī major issue for generative AI tools in the search for the lost children is a lack of data. The Grandmothers - as the organization is commonly referred to - now have access to advanced scientific toolkits, like genetic testing. In the years following the abductions, grandmothers would stand outside kindergartens, waiting to see if the exiting children looked like their disappeared sons and daughters. Goncalves Granada is among the more than 130 kidnapped who have successfully been identified - but over 300 are still missing. Since 1977, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo has strived to identify and connect the children - now grown up - to their biological families. “But it’s artistic, not scientific - it’s based on a search that is real, but images on IAbuelas are not real.” “We are grateful for the account, because it helps us spread the word about our search among the young,” Manuel Goncalves Granada, a spokesperson for the group, told Rest of World. The project isn’t formally connected to Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, but the organization has been closely following the effort. ![]() “That’s what’s most important to me - for it to feel like they are looking at you, waiting for you to do something,” Barros, whose family was also affected by the kidnappings, told Rest of World. Beyond instructions to combine the photos and age them, he prompted Midjourney to have the AI-generated subjects look into the camera. He took pictures of parents from the online archive of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an organization founded by the mothers of the abducted parents whose babies were taken to be raised by other families. The image is then posted to the IAbuelas account, along with a note on who the AI-generated person purportedly depicts, the names of their parents, and their estimated date of birth.Ĭreator Santiago Barros, an art director and designer working in film, came up with the idea after discovering Midjourney last year. The end product is a photorealistic portrait of a person in their late forties. Over four decades after hundreds of babies were kidnapped by Argentina’s military dictatorship, an Instagram account called IAbuelas has begun posting artificial intelligence-generated images that claim to imagine what the abducted children might look like today. ![]()
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