The UN Has Created AI-Generated Refugees
The UN has created two AI avatars in a bid to help more people learn about the realities faced by those fleeing war. The first is Amina, a character playing the role of a woman living in a refugee camp in Chad after she escaped violence in Sudan. Then, there’s a soldier persona called Abdalla, a character built with the behavior and decision-making patterns of an actual combatant.
Both avatars were created by the United Nations University Center for Policy Research (UNU-CPR), a research institution connected to the United Nations, as reported by 404 Media.
Why did the UN create AI-generated refugees?
Ask Abdalla was first created during an AI for Conflict Prevention class taught by Eduardo Albrecht, a professor at Columbia and a senior fellow at the UNU-CPR. He and his students started designing the avatars after a classroom discussion related to AI in humanitarian work, Albrecht says.
“The idea was to have independent academic research available to the UN,” Eleanore Fournier-Tombs, a data scientist who leads a research lab at UNU-CPR focusing on AI policy, says.
Currently, anyone can test and talk to them for three minutes. “The first is designed to create an accurate digital representation of a refugee living in a camp in Chad. The second creates a digital replica of a combatant leader in the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a group active in the southeastern part of Sudan from which many refugees are fleeing,” according to a write-up of the project.
When speaking to 404 Media, lbrecht and Fournier-Tombs explained that the goal of the workshop is to spark conversation.
How were the avatars created?
In Albrecht’s published paper by the UNU-CPR titled Does the United Nations Need Agents? he says that both Amina and Adballa were created using HeyGen.
“HeyGen relies on OpenAI’s [GPT-4o mini] to animate the video avatars, and allows for linking via [Retrieval-Augmented Generation] to an external database where the knowledge bases curated by the anthropologist agent are uploaded.” When building the avatars, Albrecht was worried about the accuracy, so he conducted a test.
However, Matthew Gault, a reporter at 404 Media, said, “Their responses feel generic and stilted, as if they were trained on UN reports about the conflict and not interviews with actual refugees.” The paper acknowledges this limitation of the agents. Additionally, the paper also questioned how the avatars could be used in humanitarian work.
“If Amina works, ‘her’ rapid responses could be of great value,” it says. But participants said “that refugees are very capable of speaking for themselves in real life,” according to the published paper.
Image`: United Nations via 404 Media
