Illustrating thorny issues with AI

Headline in OK Diario: “A Chinese man drugged and raped his minor daughter in Mallorca for five years: he put Lorazepam in her food to make her dizzy”. Beyond the first-degree racism of speaking of “a Chinese man” like that, crudely, reducing the person to their origin, what is striking about this piece is that the media illustrates it with an AI-generated image. It shows a close-up of a careless hand pouring a vial of pills onto the food, like someone tossing raisins into a salad, while the girl –who was between 9 and 14 years old during the events– is seen in the background, with her back turned, watching television. It is a grotesque and absurd image, because it is evident that the drug was not administered as if they were snacks and the matter is serious enough to speculate and create scenes that have no anchor in reality. It is true that the caption warns of the evident intervention of artificial intelligence, but this meager warning does not redeem its authors from the blunder of it all. Crime news is interesting because it shows the most extreme folds of human nature. But precisely because they deal with an extremely delicate matter, one must operate with the utmost elegance and respect for dignity. Painting news with the modern plastidecors that is AI as if they were comics or coloring books is a practice that, frankly, escapes me.

It is evident that the uses of AI must be warned about. But this does not give a free pass to spread its (often regrettable) creations in articles that presumably aspire to portray reality. It is true that some newspapers, decades ago, used illustrations. But there was an editorial intention and an aesthetic. Here there is only the exploitation of morbidity at the lowest possible cost, by degrading formal aspects. In the end, the difference between media and pseudo-media is ethical, but also aesthetic.