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“The Earth is not a toy”. A slogan as simple as it is powerful, drawn by the Fridays for Future movement in a campaign published in the run-up to International Earth Day. There are photos of the G20 leaders… children. A more than realistic editing, made possible thanks to artificial intelligence.
If you’ve ever wondered what Emmanuel Macron or Joe Biden looked like when they were children, Fridays for Future brings you the answer in pictures, through the “Earth is no toy” campaign (“La Terre n’est pas un toy”), designed by the agency Farid and Fred. Bluffing realism, the photos in question were taken in collaboration with Benjamin Benichou, AI producer based in Los Angeles. They show the leaders of the G20 children: Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping, Justin Trudeau, Giorgia Meloni, Joe Biden… “The objective is to touch our leaders, to remind them that they were once children, and to encourage them to work towards a more sustainable future for all”, explain the spokespersons of Fridays for Future in a press release.
An orchestrated operation so that the most powerful in this world “recognize the seriousness of the situation, in the hope that they become the role models we need”. The new Friday for Future campaign “Earth is no toy” is unveiled a few days before “Earth Day”, considered the most important participatory ecological movement on the planet and celebrated every April 22 for 50 years.
This is not the first time that Greta Thunberg’s movement has collaborated with the Fred and Farid agency to alert to the ecological emergency. In February 2021, when the NASA Perseverance probe had just landed on Mars, Fridays for Future released a video aimed at drawing attention to the dantesque sums of money spent in the conquest of the red planet. Entitled “1%”, the video spot uses all the codes of an advertisement to point out the millions of dollars invested in space programs focused on the planet Mars, financed by the governments of several countries in the world and the biggest fortunes of the planet (notably Elon Musk and SpaceX). “So much financial effort being expended…even though most humans will never have the chance to visit or live there. For the 99% of the world’s population remaining on Earth, we better fix climate change “, conclude the authors of the campaign.