Abstract
THE ROWS OF faces on the Instagram account stare out of the screen. Many are greying at the temples, their foreheads rutted with the cares of their five decades. They would be looking straight into the camera – if the camera actually existed.
While the images themselves are AI-generated, they represent individuals who are very real: people whose parents were forcibly disappeared by Argentina’s last dictatorship, and who were either born in captivity or kidnapped as babies along with their parents and then raised under false identities.
The dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 kidnapped, tortured and disappeared 30,000 people, according to human rights organisations. Many were drugged and thrown from planes, alive, into the River Plate in “death flights”. Others were buried anonymously or in unmarked graves. Pregnant women were often kept alive by their captors in clandestine torture centres just long enough to give birth before being murdered.
There have been intensive searches for their children – especially by their grandmothers, who formed human rights organisation the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. The Grandmothers believe around 500 babies were born in such circumstances.
To date, they have found 140 of them, using pioneering genetic testing methods to confirm the relationship between grandparent and grandchild. They are still searching for more than 300 others, who would now be in their late 40s and early 50s.
The AI-generated images are the work of Santiago Barros, an Argentine advertising creative. In late 2022 and early 2023, captivated by AI-generated images he saw online, he began to experiment with the image generation platform Midjourney. When he learned that it could use photos of two people to generate a face that resembled them both, a thought struck him.
“What would happen if I took the photos of the appropriated grandchildren’s disappeared parents, gave them to the AI as inputs, and asked it to generate the face of a new person?” Barros wondered.
The Grandmothers have meticulously documented the grandchildren’s cases on their website, and most include photos of their parents. So he began to use those pictures to generate visions of what those parents’ children might look like. For each couple, he would create images of a woman and a man because, in most cases, the sex of the baby was unknown.
For Barros, seeking justice for the disappeared is personal. When his father was a boy, his cousin Raúl Atencio was like a brother to him, and Barros has always thought of Atencio as an uncle. In October 1976, the dictatorship’s agents showed up at Atencio’s home and kidnapped him, together with his wife and his daughter, who were set free shortly afterwards. The family never saw Atencio again.
Initially, Barros conceived the project as an advertising campaign, but he didn’t have the means to put posters in the streets.
“That’s when it occurred to me to make an Instagram account, where the feed shows you all those people, like a mosaic, looking you in the eye.”
He called the account IAbuelas (“IA” means AI in Spanish, and “Abuelas” means “Grandmothers”). At the time of writing, he has 12,500 followers and 283 posts – one for each grandchild for whom photos of both parents exist.
Barros refined the prompts as he went, correcting for the biases baked into the algorithm. The AI tended to produce images suffused with the ideals of Western beauty: slim, classically attractive people with improbably light skin.
“You’d put two people with native features, and it would give you people with Caucasian features,” he said.
A symbolic representation
The question of how, exactly, to interpret Barros’s images was complex. His project was not affiliated with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, and while he had been attempting to set up a meeting through his cousin, Raúl’s daughter, it had been delayed several times. Fearful that somebody else would come up with the same idea, he launched the Instagram account before speaking to the organisation – a decision he later regretted. The Grandmothers eventually learned of the project when someone else told them about it and contacted Barros to meet.
A generic face made up from the photos used by Santiago Barros in his iAbeulas project
CREDIT: Santiago Barros/Mark Stimpson (montage)
Because of this, their first meeting got off to a prickly start, according to Barros, but it rapidly evolved into a supportive relationship.
“We were worried that people would start to think that an image generated with AI based on two photos could be something approaching the real physiognomy of a possible grandchild,” said Clarisa Veiga, press and publicity co-ordinator for the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who attended the meeting. It generated a lot of impact but also a lot of anxiety for the families.
The organisation encourages anyone who has doubts about their identity to get in touch with it. Working with Argentina’s National Genetic Database, it uses DNA testing to prove the relationship between a grandchild and their biological family. Unlike the images, that method is scientifically precise – and legally admissible.
Argentinian disappeared and how AI imagines their children might look
The Grandmothers helped Barros to frame the images he had developed as an art project. His Instagram bio clarified that it was not officially affiliated with the Grandmothers’ project, and that the images should not be taken as being “accurate”. It achieved significant media coverage in Argentina.
“I was afraid that someone would say that it generated a sense of needless morbid curiosity,” he said. Many relatives who saw his work told him that it was an emotionally intense experience but, while some disliked the concept, many families – and the Grandmothers – appreciated it as a powerful communication tool to spread the word about their search.
He also sensed that some of those who contacted him were unsure about the project’s scope. Some would send him more photos of a grandchild’s disappeared parents, hoping that providing more photos would generate a more “accurate” result – a rationale that doesn’t apply because the project does not follow a scientific method.
In one case, a man looking for his brother sent Barros photos of himself at the same time as Barros generated the image. Their messages crossed, and each received the other’s at the same time. “We both got goosebumps, because he and the result were very similar people,” he said. “The AI had given him rosacea under his eyes, along his cheekbones, and he had it, too.”
While it can be tempting to ascribe preternatural powers of prediction to artificial intelligence, the Grandmothers have always warned people not to jump to conclusions based on their resemblance to an image, AI-generated or otherwise. Veiga cautions that it can generate “very painful” false hope when individuals contact the families of the disappeared based on appearances alone.
From the outset, photos of the disappeared have had an emotionally potent role in the search, according to Cora Gamarnik, a researcher with Argentina’s Conicet research council who specialises in photojournalism during the dictatorship. At first, the shots of family celebrations that relatives provided were made public out of necessity, as relatives kicked off the search. As the true horror of their fate became clear, they took on a more symbolic role.
To justify its brutality, the military junta claimed to be waging a war against violent subversives. While guerrilla groups were indeed active in Argentina in the period leading up to the 1976 coup, the dictatorship implemented a devastating campaign of state terror that swept up innocent people and denied due process even to those who had not been involved in armed organisations.
“The photos served to counteract the campaign of defamation and hate against them, to describe them as terrorists,” Gamarnik said. “They’d say, ‘These are the famous subversives, this young girl, student, mother’. The photo, by its very presence, could unmask the campaign of terror they were subjected to.”
AI images, she says, are devoid of the symbolic force of a real photograph. “They’re images that generate more distance, they generate a sense of alienation, because it’s someone who doesn’t exist, who was created by a machine.” They should instead be seen as a different kind of tool, she said, noting that Barros’s project demonstrated Argentina’s unfailing creativity and adaptability in the human rights struggle.
For Barros, his project created images for missing people who were previously intangible. “I think that’s why the account had such an impact,” he said.