I once volunteered as a special advocate for foster children, and went through 3 months of training. During training, I saw numerous PR/awareness/fundraising posters about the work that the organization was doing. Given that this was a program focused on foster-children, the posters featured numerous children. At the end of the training, I was told that for privacy reasons, pictures should never ever be posted publicly (social media etc) of any foster child that identifies them as a foster child. Notably, this policy applied even to the organization's own posters. Not a single child in their poster is a foster child - that would have violated their privacy policy. The children in all their posters are just random kids.

We all laughed when we learnt this, but didn't think it was a big deal. Their privacy policy makes a ton of sense - if I was a foster child, I wouldn't want that to be advertised publicly. And the organization would have hamstrung itself if none of their posters featured any children. People don't donate or volunteer based on facts and logic. They do it based on empathy. Not having children's pictures at all, or only blurred photos, would be disastrous for fundraising and getting the foster children their much needed resources.

To be clear, I do not endorse lying at all. Lying makes things much worse in the long run. But the above non-profit wasn't lying in any sense. They simply showed photos of average looking kids in neutral settings, displaying neutral expressions. There was no misinformation in any of their photos. I haven't met a single donor to date who felt lied to or betrayed by their posters.

I can see the parallels between what Amnesty Intl did and the above. They have a very credible reason for not using real photos. The people protesting themselves have requested hiding their identities to avoid life-changing persecution. And Amnesty states that they explicitly labelled their images as having been produced by AI. They have clearly been acting in good faith.

In an ideal world, non-profits wouldn't need to rely on AI generated images... and people wouldn't require pictures to mobilize and get involved. But let's be realistic - there's minimal rationality in people's engagement with non-profits. I skim through the news everyday, and didn't even know there were protests happening in Colombia. The only possible way for organizations like Amnesty International to get their message out there is by using attention-grabbing images. And as long as they make a good faith effort to portray them realistically and label their images as AI-generated, I don't have a problem with it.

> To avoid misleading the public, the images included text stating that they were produced by AI.

> Gareth Sella was blinded in his left eye when a police officer in Bogotá shot him with a rubber bullet at the protests. He argued that hiding the identity of protesters makes sense to protect them from ending up in jail on inflated charges. “As the UN has documented, the state has continued pursuing protesters and more than 100 are in jail, many with disproportionate sentences, such as terrorism, to make an example of them. Hiding our identities seems sensible to me given that two years on we continue living in the fear that we could be jailed at any moment or even that they come after us on the streets,” Sella said.