Santiago Barros, a publicist in Argentina, has been attempting to use artificial intelligence (AI) to visualize what the children of parents who vanished under the dictatorship would look like now as grownups.
From the well-known activist organization Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who look for missing children, Barros almost daily posts these pictures to an Instagram account named Iabuelas, a combination of Spanish for AI and grandma (abuela).
"We have seen the photos of most of the disappeared, but we don't have photos of their children, of those children who were stolen. It struck me that these people did not have a face," Barros told AP News.
Magic of AI App
Military authorities in Argentina often kidnapped infants belonging to political dissidents who were either arrested or murdered during the country's violent dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983. Babies were regularly adopted and raised by families with ties to or ideological allegiance to the dictatorship.
Barros uses an app called Midjourney to create representations of what their children's faces could look like now by combining photographs of the missing dads and moms from the public archive of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo website.
In each combination, the app displays two female and two male candidates. Barros then selects the most credible depiction of each sex.
The goal of the research is not to duplicate the work of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in tracing grandchildren via genetic analysis. Instead, Barros said they want to remind people, especially those over the age of 46 who may be questioning their own parentage, that their grandmothers had been looking for them for more than four decades.
Back to Family
About 500 children were taken from their families, according to the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. In all, 133 grandchildren have been discovered thanks to genetic testing, as reported by AP News.
Barros' attempt to bring attention to the abducted and missing children under the dictatorship has been praised by the organization. However, they do voice the concern that DNA testing, which the National Genetic Data Bank advocated for back in 1987, is the only way to reunite these individuals with their biological families.
Barros incorporates photographs given by interested persons in addition to images taken from the archives of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
Those who have looked at Iabuelas' Instagram have often noted a uniformity in the pictures, which makes them wonder how close they are to the actual thing. In other cases, though, families looking for a missing one have been taken aback by the uncanny similarity they saw in the photos taken.
