Concerns Over AI Postcards at Junior Eurovision

by James Stephenson
Additional reporting by Gabe Milne, Sem-Anne van Dijk, Daniel Stridh and GJ Kooijman

The use of generative AI in the postcards of this year’s Junior Eurovision Song Contest in Madrid has come under scrutiny. At the contest, which was held in Spain on 16 November 2024, the show’s postcards intercut real footage of the competing artists, all between the ages of 9 and 14, with AI-generated sections of the performers.

However, questions have emerged over why AI was used in this year’s postcards, who was responsible for creating them, and whether the data captured of the child performers was rendered locally or via the cloud. 

If the postcards were rendered locally, the data captured would be stored on a local machine controlled by the creators. But if the postcards were rendered using a cloud-based AI model, the data used to create the AI clips could then be used as training for the model, giving any of its users the ability to create images trained on children.

This would mean that data captured from minors would be openly accessible, raising ethical questions about how the data was handled and the safeguarding of the performers. Additionally, there is no known evidence that the performers, nor their families, had given explicit consent for their image or likenesses to be used to create AI imagery.

EBU Explanation Cast Into Doubt

As of Monday 18 November,, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the organisers of Junior Eurovision, say that the postcards were rendered locally:

“To create the AI imagery seen in the postcard’s for this year’s event, pictures of the artists were shared by delegations and were then stored locally on the machines of the company commissioned to make them and never in a cloud.”

They further elaborated in a statement sent to Eurovision journalist Matthew Joyce that the company, who is not named, used AI softwares called Runway and Stable Diffusion to create the postcards.

“All the data developed to train the AI models was done locally using software called Stable Diffusion. 

Animations were then created on local machines in software called Runway by using the avatars created in Stable Diffusion, not the original images of the artists.”

On the surface, the EBU’s statement appears to be a credible explanation of the production process. However, technical experts and sources close to the contest’s production dispute the EBU’s claims.

To understand why, we need to introduce you to a different AI software: Luma. Luma is a company which uses a cloud-based AI model that does not have the functionality to run on local machines. That means any imagery created in Luma is created in the cloud, necessitating the uploading of data.

And, although the EBU’s statement does not name Luma, this shot from the broadcast postcard of The Netherlands’ act, Stay Tuned, clearly shows Luma’s watermark in the top right corner. This was first discovered and reported by Daniel Stridh.