Heetch spurs the entire banlieue into action to help Midjourney rectify an AI bias … with the help of postcards!
In its new ad campaign, "Greetings From La Banlieue", Heetch calls upon the 12.5 million inhabitants of the “banlieue” – the Paris suburbs – to reach out to the 11 Midjourney employees in an effort to rectify the worst prompt ever found on this generative AI: the “banlieue".
Since its inception in 2022, Midjourney's AI has revolutionized the way we interact with images. With a simple combination of "prompts", and descriptive text commands that the tool uses to generate its visuals, this AI can produce any image in a matter of seconds. However, among all the prompts available, there is one term that can transform any image into a nightmare with just a single word: "banlieue".
Banlieue means a suburb of a large city, and is obviously often used as a term in France in French newspapers, etc. As you can imagine, when the suburbs show up in the news, the photography with it isn't pretty, which in turn affects Midjourney's "eye".
So when you use the prompt "/imagine a wedding in France", Midjourney generates a happy wedding scene featuring a young man and his beautiful bride, both radiant on a beautiful, sunny day.
Yet, adding the word "banlieue" to the prompt - "/imagine a wedding in the banlieue in France" - will display two gloomy-looking individuals standing in an unclean street surrounded by run-down buildings.
This is just one of numerous examples. When you type "/imagine three young people in France", you will see three charming young women posing before the iconic Parisian backdrop of the Eiffel Tower and the city's famous rooftops. However, adding the phrase "in the banlieue" will generate a completely different image.
This unexpected situation was something Heetch, the leading ride-hailing app for trips to and from the Parisian suburbs, and its ad agency, BETC Paris, could not ignore.
The solution? Turn thousands of pictures from Heetch’s set of corrective data into individual postcards and spread them throughout the banlieue for people to use. On the back of each card is a preprinted address box, a QR code linking to the database, an explanatory note to the employees at Midjourney and, most importantly, a blank space in which every banlieue resident can add a personal message that will convince Midjourney to take action. Adding to that they made a collection of great photographs for "Greetings From La Banlieue" , showing the suburbs of Paris in a completely different - and very colorful - light. There are couples in parks, children playing, serene photographs of statues in front of beautiful old buildings, colorful street art, men with sheep, women on horseback, and details of brutalist buildings.
