I Am Hunger in America

Background

Feeding America is the USA’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization with over 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and programs.

They wanted to raise awareness of the fact that one in nine people in America experiences hunger. The problem was that hunger is often invisible, even though 37 million suffer from it regularly. It is unnoticed because hungry people do not match the stereotypical images of what being famished is supposed to look like.

Idea

AI technology was used to scan the faces of 28,000 real people who were dealing with hunger. These were cross-referenced with data from a 2018 USDA study to an image set of 1,000 photos that provided a demographically accurate representation of hunger. From there, the agency created a completely unique face, a composite face to show of what hunger actually looks like in America.

To ensure the AI-generated face still felt human, the image was overlaid on a real actor with similar facial features using 2-D modelling and facial compositing.

The campaign’s film further reinforced the humanity of the technology by highlighting real stories of hunger sourced by Feeding America. The face and voice adjusted subtly to each individual story, conveying the spectrum of people’s experiences.

Results

The campaign generated significant press coverage, helping a wider audience to better recognise and understand this invisible issue around them, the first step in making it disappear.

Our Thoughts

We have included this in Directory 53 because it is another example of how AI is making itself felt in every part our business including creative execution. We have seen several perfect recreations in advertising already, from Steve McQueen being resurrected for a Ford commercial to Marilyn Monroe selling Chanel.

The image makers usually want you to be deceived. The classic example of this was “Sweetie”, the digital creation of a child for NGO Terre des Hommes, who got sex perverts to reveal themselves online (Directory 31).

In this instance, though, the idea is to make you aware of the trickery. While the tech exists now to recreate Jimmy Dean perfectly so that he can star in a film made sixty-four years after he died, this image is not quite perfect. There is a touch of ‘uncanny valley’. I suspect this is deliberate.

Firstly, the outcry about resurrecting Dean suggests there is a shared unease about the distortion of truth. Secondly, by allowing imperfection (the pores of her skin look too modelled) the image forces your attention and, in the TV commercial certainly, you find yourself paying more attention to her and to her message.