Study finds major charities using AI to manufacture poverty imagery

Major charitable organizations are using AI-generated images of starving children and disaster victims to raise funds, creating what researchers call “poverty porn 2.0.” This practice allows charities to avoid the costs and ethical considerations of real photography while perpetuating harmful stereotypes about poverty and suffering.

What you should know: Arsenii Alenichev, a researcher at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, has documented over 100 synthetic images being used by charities in fundraising campaigns.

• Organizations like Plan International, a UK-based charity, have posted AI-generated images for anti-child marriage campaigns, while the United Nations has created “re-enactments” of sexual violence.
• These images replicate traditional “visual grammar of poverty” featuring children with empty plates, cracked earth, and stereotypical imagery of suffering.

How this differs from traditional poverty porn: The new AI approach eliminates even the minimal human interaction required in previous exploitative photography.

• Traditional poverty porn, a term coined in 2007, involved taking voyeuristic images of real poor or oppressed people to shock wealthy viewers into donating.
• “It is quite clear that various organizations are starting to consider synthetic images instead of real photography, because it’s cheap and you don’t need to bother with consent and everything,” Alenichev told The Guardian.

Why this matters: The practice represents a particularly troubling evolution in how charitable organizations exploit imagery of suffering for fundraising purposes.

• Unlike traditional poverty porn, AI-generated content creates entirely fictional scenarios of human misery, making the subjects themselves fantasy rather than reality.
• The irony is compounded by the fact that the AI technology fueling this “poverty porn 2.0” is powered by the same wealth inequality and environmental damage many charities claim to address.

The research behind it: Alenichev led a commentary article published in The Lancet, a medical journal, examining the intersection of AI technology and charitable exploitation.

• The researcher distinguishes between earlier poverty porn concepts and this new AI-driven phenomenon, calling it a more detached form of exploitation.
• The study highlights how organizations are increasingly turning to synthetic imagery to avoid the financial and ethical costs of documenting real suffering.