In 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) shared an AI-generated image of a malnourished African child with the caption ‘When you smoke, I starve’, raising urgent questions about the ethics of synthetic imagery in public health campaigns. As global health institutions face shrinking budgets and rising pressures to adopt AI as a cost-saving solution, many are turning to generative tools like Midjourney to produce visuals.
This presentation draws on interviews with global health communicators, photographers, AI artists, and archivists to unpack how AI-generated images are shaping public messaging, reinforcing visual biases, and influencing how the Global South is imagined. It also considers the ethical dilemmas practitioners face when choosing – or rejecting – synthetic visuals, and examines the implications for local photojournalists striving to represent their own communities. Ultimately, the presentation challenges us to think critically about what is gained and lost when global health communication becomes AI-assisted.
Guest speaker Arsenii Alenichev
Dr. Arsenii Alenichev is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, with a research focus on artificial intelligence and global health imagery. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Ethox Centre and the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, working on the ethics of visual representation in global health.
He earned his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam and has published widely on the epistemic and political implications of image-making, contributing to debates on equity and ethics in global health.