We found a powerful way to harness data, in combination with Artificial Intelligence, to tell a powerful human story that challenges the public perception of hunger in America.

PROBLEM

?1 in 8 people struggle with hunger in the United States.

But most Americans have no idea that the problem is so extensive and so close to home.

The reason?

Most of those struggling with it don’t fit the usual stereotypes of hunger:

64% own a home, 50% of them are Caucasian, and 66% are employed.

?

To show that hunger can look like anyone, Feeding America, a non-profit fighting to end the issue, used Data and Artificial Intelligence to create an unbiased representation of it.

A single face that represents 40 million hungry Americans, and finally makes them visible.

To show that hunger can look like anyone, Feeding America a non-profit fighting to end the issue, used Data and Artificial Intelligence to create an unbiased representation of it.

A single face that represents 40 million Americans, and finally makes them visible.

We brought the face to life through a film that told real stories of people affected by hunger.

We developed a new compositing technique that allowed us –without using CGI– to make an AI-generated look human, by blending it with real actor's faces.

Feeding America gave us tens of thousands of photos of their actual "clients" who depend on food banks. We then weighted the faces to align with detailed demographic data on hunger provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Then, we used a generative adversarial network (GAN), a form of machine learning, to study attributes of 28,000 of these real faces.

After over 1,400 hours of machine learning, the GAN was able to generate a face that didn’t exist before. The true Face of Hunger in America.

"I am Hunger in America" was a singular, unbiased face that represented the 40 million Americans struggling with hunger. It would become the literal face of the campaign, making people question how they view the problem of hunger. Through animation, we were able to bring to the life dozens of actual stories of hungry people who “morphed” from within the face created by the GAN – the face that represented all of their stories.

133MM Earned Media Impressions in the first week.

115MM Social Media Impressions.

141 News Outlets