The time for gender equality is now.
How do you tell the stories of women facing injustice without exposing the people you mean to help?
Idea Studio was asked to create an International Women's Day campaign for UN Women, on the subject of gender inequality and violence against women and girls.
The dilemma was old and difficult. The images that move people to act are often the same images that put real, identifiable people at further risk. A survivor's face can carry her story around the world, and follow her home with it.
The answer was artificial intelligence.
Every story in the campaign is true. Each was drawn from a real region where women and girls face violence and inequality. But the faces are not real. They were generated with AI so the women behind the stories could stay anonymous.
It is a quiet paradox. The technology that so often makes things feel fake was used here to make the stories feel more real, and to protect the people who lived them. We could look injustice directly in the eye without asking a single survivor to relive it in public.
Twenty women. Twenty regions. One message.
A clock ticks. Every second, a new woman appears.
Face after face meets the camera without flinching, carried by a rising score of dramatic strings. Then the ticking stops. The clock holds. And a single line lands in the silence: The time for gender equality is now.
Developed in late 2022. Launched in March 2023.
This was one of the first social-good campaigns built on generative AI, and one of the earliest advertising campaigns of any kind to use it. At a moment when AI image-making was only beginning, we were working at the very edge of what the tools could do, generating and processing each portrait to hold up at full scale.
The film was mastered in 8K. The realism that feels ordinary today was, at the time, close to the frontier. The idea has only grown more relevant since.
Among the first campaigns anywhere to use AI for good.
Twenty women stare down their oppressors with the strength of all women behind them.
It is a direct message from the women facing injustice to the men in a position to end it. The campaign ran as a film and a series of portrait posters, each face rendered in the same unflinching style.
The campaign moved from the screen into the street.
Beyond the film, the work ran as a digital out-of-home and social campaign across Stockholm, the same unflinching portraits meeting commuters in stations and shopping centres. In Sweden the line was localized: Tiden för jämställdhet är nu.
One message, carried across three continents.
Produced on behalf of UN Women Sweden, the campaign was adopted by UN Women national committees in Sweden, Spain and New Zealand for International Women's Day.
UN Women is the leading global advocate for gender equality.
Support the work of UN WomenThe thinking behind this campaign is explored in The Real Face of Injustice, an article by Bruce Sinclair on the ethics of photographing vulnerable people, and using AI to tell their stories responsibly.