Can AI and ethical storytelling coexist?

In our latest IBT Voices piece, Laura Oakley describes how Plan International UK used generative AI to bring a campaign about gender inequality to life – while keeping human judgement at its centre.

Generative AI gets a lot of stick, and much of it is deserved. There are genuine concerns about its environmental footprint, its habit of reinforcing tropes, and the fear that it replaces the creativity – and jobs – of real people. For charities especially, squaring the use of AI with commitments to inclusive and ethical storytelling can feel somewhat uneasy. But there is also an opportunity – for greater efficiency and to bring difficult ideas to life.  

This year at Plan International UK, we took an AI-hybrid approach to create our new brand campaign, The Fine Print. It was a considered, purposeful decision. As a global children’s charity advancing equality for girls and a just world for all, we can only live out our mission if we cut through to our audiences. And that’s getting harder to do in this modern world saturated with content and competing demands on people’s attention.

AI let us bring an otherwise unworkable idea to life and gave us more creative control over the emotional response we needed. The trick was keeping humans at the wheel. 

The challenges of creating an AI-hybrid campaign

Our brand campaign The Fine Print tells the story of gender inequality through visually arresting images of a newborn baby girl paired with a sprawling list of terms and conditions. In the film, the T&Cs hang from an overly long hospital wristband. In the stills, a familiar T&C box sits above the baby. In both, the message is simple: girls are forced to accept unfair terms from the moment they enter the world – terms that limit their rights, safety and opportunities. 

The concept was human-made, developed with creative agency, the Gate, based on the core truth that women alive today will not see gender equality in their lifetime. Audience research told us people cared deeply about the issues we work on but switched off when the world felt too broken. This attention-grabbing concept felt like it could break through and connect the dots between the experiences of girls and women worldwide.

But casting a real baby for this campaign raised serious concerns – about consent, about a newborn’s inability to agree to any of this, and about the practical limits of shooting an infant for only minutes at a time when the story demanded far more. We also wanted this baby to be as relatable and universal as possible – not one child with one story, but an experience shared the world over. A real baby risked narrowing that. An AI baby, on balance, wouldn’t.

The importance of following AI guidelines

We asked ourselves: what is the fairer, more ethical route? Our guidelines are clear – we don’t generate images or video that look like real people unless co-created with those they represent, but we can use AI to aid storytelling through an obviously fictional character. This baby would be deliberately nameless and universal, which felt more comfortable than using a real newborn.

So we opted for the AI route. This still meant a real shoot, on location, with a crew. But we shot with dolls as reference props, then used AI in post-production to bring the baby to life. The baby’s movements were based on actual footage, and its appearance was carefully developed through close creative collaboration. This was enhancement, not creation from scratch, with an almost even split of AI tools and traditional post-production. The process was more like creating an animation. We didn’t touch AI until the offline edit was approved, and only applied it to the specific shots we needed. This minimised unnecessary iterations and let us refine the baby’s expression precisely, landing an emotional tone a real newborn couldn’t have given us.

Across all our campaign outputs, we disclosed our use of AI – even knowing that doing so might create some emotional distance from a campaign designed to provoke the opposite reaction. This was a deliberate decision, made in the context of how much mistrust audiences already have of AI-generated content. We wanted to be transparent and upfront, because for charities, trust is the key currency we can’t afford to damage.

AI guidelines should offer a framework not be prescriptive 

The campaign reached 3 million people in the UK and led to a 3% increase in brand awareness (modest but significant for a charity with relatively low public familiarity) and a 9% increase in understanding of who we are and what we do (YouGov). With 75% of survey respondents agreeing that the campaign was attention-grabbing and the message was clear, it also demonstrated strong emotional resonance and talkability. But what does it mean for how Plan International UK uses generative AI in the future?

It means we’re AI open and curious. Adopting this AI-hybrid approach was right for this particular project. But that doesn’t mean it sets a rule for the future. 

What matters more is that we continue to have a strong framework guiding our use of AI in creative ways that isn’t just a list of dos and don’ts, but a set of questions we keep asking ourselves. So that as both the technology and the policies around safeguarding and ethics evolve, our approach evolves with them.

The lesson from The Fine Print isn’t that AI is safe to use freely. It’s that ethical storytelling and generative AI can coexist – but only if every use is deliberate, disclosed, and weighed against the harm it could cause. 

For us, that means staying engaged with AI rather than opting out of the conversation altogether. Understanding it and the challenges that come with it feels essential to making sure the ethical storytelling standards our sector has spent years building keep pace with the technology.

This matters even more given the pressure most charities are under. Organisations like ours face soaring costs, funding cuts and changing giving behaviours, while need worldwide is only growing more urgent. AI offers a way to scale production and reach creative possibilities we couldn’t otherwise afford. But it’s not a shortcut – it’s a tool, and like any tool in this line of work, its value depends entirely on human hands behind it.

Laura Oakley is Brand & Content Lead at Plan International UK