Reflections Before the Storm: the AI Reproduction of Biased Imagery in Global Health Visuals.

The Health Policy paper of Esmita Charani and colleagues,1 showed how stereotypical global health tropes (such as the so-called suffering subject and white saviour) can be perpetuated through the images chosen to illustrate publications on global health. We propose that generative artificial intelligence (AI), which uses real images as a basis for learning, might further serve to show how deeply embedded the existing tropes and prejudices are within global health images. This in turn can perpetuate oversimplified social categorisations and power imbalances.