Using artificial intelligence, Argentine publicist Santiago Barros has been attempting to provide an answer by imagining what the children of parents who vanished under the dictatorship may look like as adults. Barros posts these photos to an Instagram account called iabuelas, which is a mashup of the Spanish words for grandmother and artificial intelligence (IA) and was inspired by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, a well-known activist group that looks for missing children.
Barros creates representations of what the faces of their children could seem like as adults today by combining images of the disappeared fathers and moms from the Grandmothers website’s public database using an app called Midjourney. The software displays two female and two male options for each combo. The most convincing representation of each gender is then picked by Barros.
The goal of the project is not to supplant the Grandmothers group’s efforts to identify grandchildren through DNA testing. Instead, according to Barros, the intention is to awaken anyone over 46 who might be having second thoughts about their origins and serve as a reminder of the more than 40 years the grandmothers have spent looking for their children.
500 children are believed to have been kidnapped from their parents under the dictatorship, according to the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. 133 grandkids have been found by the group thanks to DNA research. The group recognizes Barros’ initiative as a means of bringing attention to the kids who were kidnapped or stolen under the dictatorship. However, they caution that the National Genetic Data Bank, whose establishment they supported in 1987, still uses DNA testing as the only foolproof method to connect these individuals with their families of origin.
Barros also utilizes images from interested parties’ collections in addition to those from the Grandmothers’ archives. Some users of iabuelas have observed a tendency toward homogeneity in the photos, which raises concerns about how closely the images represent reality.
This was the situation with Matas Ayastuy, who got in touch with Barros and gave him pictures of his missing parents so he could see what a potential sibling or sister would look like. Marta Bugnone, his mother, was abducted in 1977 while she was expecting. She and his father Jorge Ayastuy’s photos were combined to produce some stunning results by the AI tool.
“Many people think of me as the male ideal. But it was the feminine one that gave me something very, very powerful. Ayastuy observed a “very striking resemblance to a cousin of mine.” There have not yet been any documented instances of an adult recognizing oneself in one of Barros’ photographs and subsequently beginning a formal identification process in the month since the initiative’s debut.
All of the photos of the missing parents and their potential offspring are posted to the Instagram account along with a disclaimer stating that iabuelas is a “unofficial artistic project” and that the outcomes of AI-generated searches may not be accurate. The grandson of Pedro Sandoval, who was identified in 2006, first supported Barros’ project but eventually came to the conclusion that it was flawed because it appeared to rely too heavily on “standardized patterns” of persons with European traits. His father, Pedro Sandoval, and mother, Liliana Fontana, are two of the 30,000 people listed as missing by aid organizations.
While acknowledging that the app might be biased, Barros pointed out that many of the missing people had European ancestry and that they were living in a nation with significant European immigration. The grandmothers have asked people to treat the AI campaign with a grain of salt since they don’t want it to instill false expectations in individuals who notice parallels with the created photographs.
