Junior Eurovision has come and gone but this year’s edition was not without its controversy and complaints, while many were not happy with the change in the presentation of the points in the final the main complaint from this year’s competition came from the organisers’ decision to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create both the postcards and backing visuals for the event.
The postcards were an area of notable concern as they involved AI versions of the competing artists, to do this it is alleged that the EBU and host broadcaster RTVE had used images of the underage contestants to train an AI model to replicate them. The use of images of children to train AI is incredibly controversial and widely considered to be unethical especially if used on a cloud AI model, meaning that the uploaded imagery is being used to train the model globally as opposed to locally.
In response to the criticism the EBU has released the following statement:
Throughout their history the Eurovision live events have always been at the forefront of using new technology to create exciting experiences for viewers. To create the Al imagery seen in the postcards for this year’s event, pictures of the artists were shared by delegations and were then stored locally on the machines of the company commissioned to make them and never in a cloud. All the data developed to train the Al models was also done locally using software called Stable Diffusion. Therefore, no data created from training the models on the artist’s faces was placed in a cloud either. Animations were then created on local machines in software called Runway by using the avatars created in Stable Diffusion, not the original images of the artists. All relevant data protection laws were adhered to, and all data will be deleted from the individual machines that were used to create the animations now the project is over. The safeguarding of all those participating in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest whether onsite or online is our top priority.
– European Broadcasting Union via X (ItsMatthewJoyce)
In the statement, the EBU claims that they never used a cloud-based service to generate the images. Despite this questions still remain for the EBU while it is true that Stable Diffusion can be used locally to create avatars of the artists without uploading them to a cloud server it is less clear whether this is true for the other AI software they used which the EBU in their statement claim they only ever uploaded the Stable Diffusion avatars to and never actual images of the children although the avatars themselves were trained and based on the children.
They claim that they created the video imagery using Runway AI which they claim was installed on a local machine – however, while old versions of Runway were able to be used locally this functionallity was removed following the release of the newest versions of the AI and Runway has not therefore not been able to be run locally in over a year.
Meanwhile, the statement does not mention Luma AI, which is an entirely cloud-based AI service making it impossible that this was done locally. In their statement, they claim all the video footage came from Runway AI but we know this is not true.
It was discovered after the competition that in the postcard for the Netherlands’ entry a watermark for Luma AI had been left in – unless the EBU is adding random watermarks of random AI companies to their broadcasts we can likely presume that this is evidence that Luma AI was used to produce at least this postcard.
As Luma is unable to be run locally it is suspected that, at least in the case of the Dutch entry, images of the children were uploaded to the cloud-based server or as the EBU claimed was the case with Runway, avatars that had been created in Stable Diffusion were uploaded to the cloud.
The EBU is still yet to comment on the use of Luma AI at the competition.
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