As part of Flickr Foundation’s New Curators program, A Generated Family of Man evaluates the current capabilities of generative AI by using The Family of Man photographs as a benchmark.
Will A.I be able to generate the visual essence of humanity? Could we qualitatively measure the progress of Generative A.I?
The Family of Man is a 1975 photography exhibition held in the MoMa, New York; it’s renowned for the collection of 503 photographs depicting humanity from 23 countries.
As a simple experiment to test the current capabilities of generative A.I, we tried to replicate these photos using Microsoft’s Bing Image Creator.
Our team created both human and AI captions for these original photographs to generate two types of images.
Since our goal was to manually regenerate 300+ photographs, we set certain parameters and limits to sustain this process. This included using constant descriptors, limiting iterations of captions, or adding specific contextual descriptors. More details can be found in this blog post.
A Generated Family of Man is a physical timestamp of Gen A.I’s progress in the summer of 2023.
As this project evolves into an iterative series, it enables us to visualize the rapid progress of Gen A.I. If we were to repeat this process in 2025, will image generation be faster? Will Microsoft Bing still exist? Will the images feel more authentic?
As this highlights the importance of qualitative, experimental research in generative A.I, we hope it sparks more critical discussions and evaluations.
This project was created at the Flickr Foundation (06.2023 - 09.2023) with Maya Osaka, under the creative direction of George Oates.
