Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center was about to launch the World’s First Permanent Robert Capa exhibition when Artificial Intelligences broke into the scene and instantly started being celebrated by many as the future of image. That context suddenly put the launching of the exhibition in front of a challenging situation: the most relevant event of the brand’s recent history, could end up going unnoticed. The objective was clear: getting the exhibition the awareness it deserved and taking the general audience to the Photography Center. At the same time, while most of the media was spreading the advanced capabilities that text-to-image generators showed, not much was being said about how the authorship, copyrights and originality in the art world were being affected.

A cursor blinks over a white canvas when we hear a keyboard typing sound. The video unveils its mechanic as we discover that a text description of an image is being written. After the completion of every word, a different AI generated image appear on the screen. For instance, we read “A soldier” and a matching picture of an AI generated soldier appears. After different images have been displayed, the full text description is on the screen and the final AI generated result appears. The ending of the text description reads “as interpreted by an AI image generator”. At that moment, we cut to the original image from which the text description came from: a photography by Robert Capa. The super reads “Machines don’t see the world as humans do”. A final super shows the details for the World’s First Permanent Robert Capa exhibition.

What started as a traditional campaign turned out to be an artistic project celebrating the human eye and sparking a global debate on the importance of originality and ownership in the art world. The project ended up being displayed at Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center next to the original images, and grabbing once more the eye of the audience it helped attract to the event. The campaign is still ongoing and being displayed on media outlets all around the globe. The final results are still to be measured but the Photography Center already reported a considerable rise in daily visitors, helping the exhibition become a must-see for locals and tourists. This way, a brand built on historical events that happened decades ago managed to slip into the hottest topic of today’s world.