The starving child whose picture broke your heart when you saw it on a charity website may not be real. Global health researchers say that stock image companies like Adobe are profiting from AI-generated "poverty porn" that non-profits are using to drum up donations.

In an article published in Lancet Global Health, Arsenii Alenichev, a researcher at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, reports that, despite years of pushback in the global health community to discourage the exploitative use of images of suffering, generative AI has compounded the problem by making image generation easily accessible and affordable.

Alenichev and co-authors Sonya de Laat, Mark Hann, Patricia Kingori, and Koen Peeters Grietens recently collected more than 100 AI-generated images from vario

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