Brazilian Organisations Raise Awareness of Structural Racism in AI

Based on real prompt results, the film 'The Prompt Bias' highlights how Generative AI platforms are not immune to societal and historical prejudices.

The film was directed by the duo SALSA and produced by Primo Content Brazil in collaboration with Favela Films, the audio visual branch of CUFA, and Africa Creative. The original soundtrack was composed by Halley Sound.

"We deal with AI tools for generating images and texts all the time in our daily lives. During one of our searches, we encountered this shocking racist bias in one of the most prestigious image generation platforms. Immediately we felt compelled to recreate that experience and share our feeling of perplexity with these biased images, transforming that feeling into a film.” comment directors Diego Santana Claudino and Guto Azevedo, the two halves of the duo SALSA.

Beyond the film, the project also includes an immersion with young people from Favela Films. The aim is to discuss how new generations of filmmakers, advertisers, and audio visual professionals deal with these challenges. These meetings will generate a report of reflections to be presented to programming and AI companies to review these codes and algorithms, adopting a more supportive and antiracist perspective.

"All artificial intelligence originates from natural intelligence. This is obvious, but it is also clear that this original intelligence has imbued algorithms with biases, sometimes racist, propagated and disseminated by machines that are beyond human control. We can never normalise racism. We must propose a new antiracist code that rethinks how society views Black people, not just in Brazil but worldwide. This is the significant denunciation and provocation that CUFA makes in this film," says Celso Athayde, founder of CUFA (Central Union of Favelas).

"We want to take this opportunity to discuss a form of intrinsic racism in our work tools. But we want to do this in cooperation with the very victims of racism: Black people who work in our industry and feel the full weight of relentless discrimination, which, as we now see, is also perpetuated by our own creative tools" emphasises John Oliveira, CEO of Favela Films.

The entire project includes a series of film screenings and debates in communities, schools, and institutions across the country, promoting an open and inclusive dialogue about the challenges and possible solutions to combat structural racism in the digital age.