“Just a smidge darker for the face,” the director murmurs, pushing back his glasses against his fair skin. The PA types in the prompts, and waits as the chat loads. The image produced is more distorted than the last. The director groans into his hands and calls for five. The studio is dark, lights dim and curtains drawn. The workers are professionals, with years and years of experience, I know, from stalking their LinkedIn for hours before submitting the internship application. They aren’t novices who forget to leave the door locked just in time for an (un)timely shout of hey! or forget to fill the SD card. These are professionals.I glance at the set, impressed at the richly textured grass that ruffled with the lightest cooler breeze, the soft glow streaming in from the headlights on the second floor, and the background set against a rotting, fly-buzzing garbage dump.The only thing missing, of course, is the model. — The office tour starts with the hallway, campaign photos hung across their yellow-purple walls. I’m immediately drawn to a painting of a girl reading The Hate U Give. “How do you avoid copyright?” I ask the employee in-charge of touring us. Videos on YouTube get struck by the second for even a mere mention of a title, yet here was the whole book cover. When he doesn’t immediately answer, I glance back to find him sheepish, staring at a point above me.I blink, turn to the image, then to her ears, her fingers, her nose. The background looks realistic, the hands match. Her eyes look like my mom’s. “It’s AI-generated?” “Yes, we use generative tools like Midjourney to achieve that effect,” the director cuts in, having overheard our conversation. “But it’s not the same quality, is it?” my classmate murmurs to me, pointing out the now slightly noticeable distortions: eerily soft and smooth skin, colours too blended to be natural.It’s quick, costless, hassle-free. The director explains, when she repeats the same question to him. And efficiency is everything in a business. Sometimes quality must be compromised for convenience. Yes, it might be a bit – he says in a voice of difficulty, as if trying to explain a mature, complicated topic to a child – typical, but it's what gets eyeballs. This is the profession, unfortunately.They have their motto written on a banner painted on the front wall. SAVE THEIR LIVES, it reads. GIVE THEM THEIR DIGNITY BACK. The peon mops the paan, gum, and piss stuck to the wall. There’s some on his shoe. The majority of the funds don’t even go to Africa, I know, from stalking their Statistica reports. Who are you even helping?—There’s a flurry of smiling faces in tattered gowns, a few with hot, steaming cups of milk, others with celebrations in houses smaller than the makeup room. It seems like a strange inverse of the row before it. “We’ll need a few, uh, different shots,” I say, pointing to the line of identical bedridden Black babies.“Like… Nigerians?” Someone asks. “We can add the flag.” “No, um,” I struggle, but get there, “how about some more diverse photos?”“We’ll sprinkle in a little D&I for our Gen-Z audience,” the director adds, winking at us. An image of a white boy scraping pasta from a container, a black man charitably offering him a hot dog roll, outside of a garbage truck appears. It reminds me of a construction crane, a clean lift and shift. This is wrong, no one says. I watch without comment as he scrolls through an entire B-roll of airbrushed children crying big, fat tears. There are approximately 50 million people amalgamated into that image. From phones across the planet, from illegal porn sites, from the photo roll on my IG stories, from the device you’re reading this on, scraped from all over the Internet. It is only when he laughs and says I was good at maths for a Liberal Arts student do I realize I’ve spoken out loud. “Just a smidge lighter,” the director says, after the fifth prompting. What are you trying to create? I don’t say. It’s the profession, after all.