Who Are We Doing It For?

To celebrate 150 years of the tram’s running in Munich, the public transport authority, MVG, set up a poster campaign around the city. The only problem? All of the humans in the photos are AI-generated.

Now, wide open mouths, unnaturally smooth features, and of course the signature soulless, dead-eyed stare follow you all over the town. It’s creepy, sad, and entirely unnecessary. I’m sure the MVG has plenty of actual photos in its archives. Featuring, you know, humans—the reason the tram exists.

It’s not just that the streetcars were invented and are build and operated by humans. It’s that the whole purpose of the tram is to transport people from A to B. There simply aren’t enough robots involved to warrant celebrating them. Not yet, anyway.

The campaign wants to highlight how great it is to have this public good so folks can get around the town. If there was ever a time to show some real evidence of people actually doing so, it would be now. A man waving out of a tram window in 1920. A smiling girl eating ice cream with a tram in the background in the 50s. Heck, you cold have held a photoshoot now just for this campaign.

Yet, somewhere, someone sat and thought it would be funnier, faster, cheaper, or all three to throw some prompts into a machine—and apparently no one challenged this misguided idea on its way to the printing presses.

It’s often a relatively easy question to answer: Who are we doing it for? The hard part is accepting the result and then doing the work. The “how” can only ever follow from the “who.” Methods mean little without purpose, and it’s hard to celebrate people with pictures that have none in them.