Responses by Daniel Bnaya, chief creative officer, blanco.
Background: The World is Moving Forward Leaving Women Behind campaign aims to bring attention to the gender inequality women face worldwide in business, leadership and senior professions. Even little girls use terms like chief executive officer, president and doctor and think of only men in these professions, which is absurd to us, and that’s what we want to change. The Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) believes that language has a huge impact on people’s lives—particularly women—and we were looking for a way to prove that point.
Design thinking: We came up with an idea to test the most advanced technology in the world that uses text to create visuals: AI. In our study of the Midjourney platform, we discovered that women are indeed left behind by AI when it comes to portraying senior professional roles. From that point on, we decided that the campaign’s visuals would all be made by artificial intelligence with only an explanatory text added by humans.
Challenges: We wanted each ad to be as beautiful as possible to demonstrate how advanced AI technology is—and then juxtapose the beauty of its artwork with the ugly nature of our message. To do that, we were challenged to generate highly crafted AI images in various art styles.
New lessons: Although the creation process was amazing in terms of technology, art and design, it was also very sad; we tried more than 1,000 different wordings and styles and saw how the AI generated images of men time after time. We wanted to create a fourth ad with the prompt “pilot” but discovered that the AI sometimes drew a woman. Although it ruined one of our ads, it was very encouraging.
Time constraints: Since this campaign involved new technology we had to learn and master, we worked on these ads for about a month and a half. The talented women at WIZO gave us as much time as we needed to create this campaign as best as possible, and it was a pretty nice schedule to work on for a change.
Specific project demands: It might sound a bit bad, but every time we asked AI to generate an image, we had this little “worry” that it would draw a woman this time. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen—or we were lucky it didn’t happen. You decide.
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