Making the invisible, visible: Pictures as the most powerful force for change | PhotoVogue Festival 2023: What Makes Us Human? Image in the Age of A.I.

Hi everyone.

Thank you for having me here today.

So I m going to continue on the theme of social change

and using AI as a force for good

and a force for that social change.

So as mentioned, I m actually a lawyer.

I m not an artistic person,

but my colleague Jennifer, who is here as well and I,

have been working on a project

with a creative company around AI

and Australia s treatment of refugees.

So to give you a bit of background

before we go into it further,

you might not know the history around this issue.

So Australia, since 2013 has been sending anyone

that arrives by boat to two islands

off the coast of Australia.

These are Nauru and also Manus Island.

So Nauru, I believe is the smallest country in the world.

It s five kilometers by four kilometers long

and then Manus Island is a island

off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

So women and children, families, are sent to Nauru

and then single adult men are sent to Papua New Guinea.

So since 2013 there has been countless, countless stories

of horrific human rights abuses on these islands.

So the stories that have come out range from sexual assault,

physical assault, countless incidents of self-harm

such as sowing lips shut.

And these are some of the issues

that I m going to touch on today.

So I did wanna give that content warning,

before I show you some of the photos

and a video that we have made.

So what s happened in Australia

is that these human rights abuses have been allowed

to continue, virtually unchecked.

And one of the main reasons this could continue

is because no photographers, no cameras,

not even mobile phones, have been allowed

in the detention centers.

So to give you an example,

I tried as a lawyer to apply for a visa

to go to Nauru myself and I was rejected.

And the answer that was given to me was,

Clearly, you re a lawyer, we think you want to get in there

and see what they re like.

So I couldn t get a visa.

So we ve been operating in this context

where we hear stories,

but we can t see what s happening.

So as lawyers, we ve been doing our best,

we ve been using the court system.

One example of this

is a case that I ll speak very briefly about,

but it was a large class action for 30,000 people

saying that Nauru and Manus Island were not safe,

particularly for children.

So we were saying that no one should be sent there,

but particularly children.

Unfortunately we weren t successful in court

for a variety of legal reasons

that I will not bore you with.

But what was really interesting about this project,

is that we spent over 300 hours

talking and gathering stories from what happened to people

in these detention camps.

So when the case was discontinued,

we were really devastated,

cause we thought we might lose this evidence.

And in fact, the 80 people that gave us a witness statement

said to us, Please find another way to share our stories.

Please let people in Australia,

but also all around the world,

know what is happening to us on this island.

So we sat down with the refugees themselves

and we said, How would you like us to share your story?

You tell us.

Almost all of those individuals said,

Can you create an image?

Can you turn our story into a picture?

And if you remember, there are no pictures

of what the tents look like.

There are no pictures of guards assaulting individuals.

So we said, That sounds like a really excellent idea

and we ll work on that.

And the specific thing that I remember

one of my clients saying was, Pictures transcend

cultural, social, and other differences

and we want to get our stories out like this.

So that is what led to the creation of, Exhibit A-i,

which is the witness statements from this class action

fed through Midjourney, and then images created

of what the court documents say.

So we have a quite a short video to show you

that gives some background to this project.

So if we could have that played now. Thank you.

[images clicking] [pensive music]

[Participant] I witnessed a man burning himself to death.

[Participant 2] I had a very young baby.

He was witness with the suicide.

He was witness with everyone screaming.

He was witness with everyone fighting.

[Participant 3] He put his hand over my mouth,

he then raped me.

[Participant 4] I was worried things will happen,

I live in fear of violence and abuse.

[Participant 5] I came by boat,

because my country was so dangerous for me.

I just wanna be able to live my life.

Photo journalism is so raw and visceral.

The heart of this project

is making sure that these witness statements are honored

and have the impact that they deserve.

[audience applauding]

So I wanted to talk a little bit

about how we worked with refugees

in the process to create this together.

So to start that, I actually have a quote

from one of our clients

about why they wanted to do this project.

So she said, I wanted not just Australian people,

but people all over the world to know what we went through.

It is not something that we will ever forget.

After five years, I still have nightmares

that I am on Nauru.

I wanted to be involved in creating these images,

so that people could not just read,

but also see what happened to us.

I hope that this project means

that this doesn t happen to any other human.

So what we did is we asked the 80 individuals,

Would you like to be involved in this program?

And around 50 said, Yes.

We would like our statements

turned into AI generated images.

We then said, How much would you like to be involved?

So about 25, 30 people said,

I want to be intimately involved in creating the images.

So what we did in partnership with Howatson + Co,

which is a creative agency in Australia,

we fed the court documents through Midjourney,

which is a similar program that was mentioned before.

And images came out, multiple images

for each witness statement.

They were quite strange at first

and then people that were willing to

and felt confident and comfortable in doing so,

sat down with us

and said, The trees on Nauru looked a bit different.

cause first of all, Midjourney,

I mean Nauru is a tropical island

and Midjourney put all, like, winter fir trees

from Europe all across the island.

So we took those out.

We then gave everyone that wanted to,

have them, their images.

And then we had a day in Melbourne

where we flew everyone there

and we spent the entire day talking to them saying,

Is there anything you d like to change?

How does this represent your experience?

And for some people that was a incredibly difficult process,

but it also resulted in the AI generated images

that were as close to reality as we could put together.

Now, some people didn t wanna be involved in that process

and that s fine,

but we did have an advisory group of refugees

who were on Nauru and Manus that would look at each image

and say, The tents weren t like that.

Or, Where we ate meals wasn t like that.

So we came to what we felt like was the closest we could get

to representing the human rights abuses that were occurring.

So I ll show you some of these images.

I won t speak to most of them,

but there are a couple that I will comment on.

[audience murmuring]

I will say one thing about this photo

that was really interesting in the creation process.

When we put Iranian women

or Rohingyan women into Midjourney,

it generated every single woman as wearing a hijab.

And that was a really interesting political process,

cause at the time the revolution was going on in Iran,

and I would say at least 50% of our clients

involved in the project were Iranian women.

So it was actually quite contentious

when Midjourney started putting hijabs

on every single Iranian woman.

So we had to do a lot of training with the program

and changing it to actually be culturally sensitive to that.

This is also interesting,

cause when we were taking the statements

in almost every statement, people would say, Oh,

we could only have two minute showers.

Sometimes I kept my clothes on.

And I think I never really took, and this sounds bad,

but that much notice of that,

because there were so many horrific abuses happening.

But as soon as I saw it in an image,

it actually had much more of an impact

around the indignity of having to wear your clothes

while you shower, because you have no privacy,

you have no time.

I wanted to elaborate on this slide briefly as well.

So that s a short version of the quote.

But to give you an idea of the creation process

behind this particular image,

it took about three weeks of working with the refugee

who gave this statement

and we went back and forth

and back and forth, so many times, until we got to exactly

how they remember the tents being on Nauru.

So the full statement that was fed into Midjourney was,

There was mold everywhere in the tent.

It was all over the walls and the ceiling.

At night when the humidity was especially bad,

water would collect on the ceiling of the tent

and start to drip down all over me.

There were mornings when I woke up

and I thought someone had thrown a glass of water over me,

because I was so wet.

And I think for people in Australia,

some of the feedback we got

is that it was one thing to read that statement,

but the picture brings it to life to a much greater degree.

So in terms of what we use this project for,

we wanted it to make an impact.

So for us, in partnership with the refugees

we are working with, we created a book,

which was shown in the video.

We created a website, which I encourage everyone to go to.

We also met with members of Parliament.

And interestingly around the conversation with AI,

we actually wanted to create a correct historical record.

So in Australia, politicians were saying

There was no mold in the tent,

there was no sexual assault happening.

So for us, using AI

was the way to try to protect that historical accuracy

and those stories.

When we have meetings with politicians,

they would constantly say to us,

We didn t know that was happening.

Or, That didn t happen.

So trying to capture their stories

in a way that would resonate with people

was really important

in trying to put on the record these human rights abuses.

And I think the other really interesting thing

was the effect on the people who shared their stories.

We were really surprised by how cathartic the process was.

Some of the feedback that we got

was that it was a really empowering experience.

It was a way of dealing with trauma.

And also, when the legal system failed,

the feedback that we got

was that this was the closest to justice

that anyone had gotten

that had been detained on these islands.

So going through that process of creating this image,

of sharing it, was a form of justice to these individuals.

One of the participants told us,

I m so proud of myself

that I could fight back by telling my story

through these images.

So the final thing I will say about this project

is that obviously there are a lot of things

that we had to think about,

around ethics and how we present these images.

So we were really clear

that we didn t want anyone to think they were real.

Every image should be labeled AI generated image.

The first version that came out of Midjourney

looked exactly like a photograph.

And we actually asked the agency to go back

and say, Could you make it look slightly less real?

Cause the point isn t for people to think they re real,

the point is for people to understand

that what they are depicting is exactly what happened,

and it comes from the court documents in the case.

So we did try to incorporate that into the project,

in taking a ethical approach to AI

where we re publishing things that was not safe for people

to smuggle photographs out.

There were no cameras allowed.

And we ve tried to create the framework

around this project with that.

So that is everything I have to say today.

The exhibition is out there

and some of the witness statements are contained in full.

So I encourage you to go and have a look

and also check out the website.

Thank you.

[audience applauding]