Front cover of A Generated Family of Man
A Generated Family of Man
Data Collection & Management/ AI Image Generation/ Publication Design/ Corporate Blogging
A Generated Family of Man is a recreation of the photographic classic ‘The Family of Man’ using over 500 AI generated images.
In the summer of 2023 I spent three months working at Flickr Foundation as a design intern. Flickr Foundation is the foundation for Flickr, the photo management and sharing app. When I joined the team for my work placement, the foundation was still in its infancy and as such I was lucky to be able to help them kickstart the first project in their New Curators program called ‘A Flickr of Humanity’.
‘A Flickr of Humanity’ is a series of curatorial projects inspired by the 1955 photography exhibition and publication titled ‘The Family of Man’. This exhibition showcased 503 photographs taken in 68 countries across the globe with the aim of celebrating universal aspects of the human experience following on from WWII. The exhibition photos were compiled into a publication of the same name and is widely considered a photographic classic.
One of the curatorial projects within ‘A Flickr of Humanity’ that I worked on was the creation of a publication titled ‘A Generated Family of Man’. This was an exploration into generative AI imagery. Me and my fellow intern Juwon Jung, recreated a vast selection of the images in ‘The Family of Man’ by writing descriptions of each image and passing it through Bing’s Image Creator. We then designed the publication which was based off of the original ‘Family of Man’. While the layouts aren’t an exact replica, there are several pages where they are the same so if you view the original ‘Family of Man’ publication alongside ‘A Generated Family of Man’ you can easily make side by side comparisons. The publication is a critique on AI image generation but also acts as a time stamp to show where generative AI was at in 2023.
The thing that struck me the most about working on this project is, at a glance, it is hard to tell whether an AI generated image is a real photo or a generated image. Upon closer inspection many quirks or flaws begin to surface and it becomes obvious that it is a generated image. In some instances the flaws are very obvious, and sometimes quite terrifying, with disfigured body parts, or quite funny. Given AI Image Generation is still in its infancy at the time, I was simultaneously very impressed and a little terrified by the life like quality that was produced. As I write this (in April of 2024) it is amazing to think that since I worked on this project AI image generation has probably already come on leaps and bounds and how very soon, it will be fascinating to flick through ‘A Generated Family of Man’ and gawk at how bad AI image generation was back then.
Find out more about ‘A Generated Family of Man’ and ‘A Flickr of Humanity’ by reading some of content that I helped write on Flickr Foundation’s website!