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> I guess I don't understand what people want out of the fake image generator. Plausible images. > It will never produce anything historically accurate as a visual medium, because the images never existed. Is there any photograph of Louis XIV? No, because photography had not been invented. But Louis the Fourteenth was a human being, and if a camera were sent back in time and placed in such a way that photons from the Sun or candles bounced off of his skin and hit that camera, on a particular day when he was wearing particular clothing, then the camera would record a certain picture. If I ask an image generator for ‘photograph of the French king Louis XIV’ that’s what I want. I probably don’t want a picture of a Chinese noblewoman, or a painting of a grapefruit, or a Mondrian sketch. Okay, well what about things which never happened at all? I still want them to be otherwise consistent with reality. If I ask for ‘Vikings fighting an UFO’ there’s a lot of latitude for the AI to play with. The UFO could be a flying saucer, or a plane/jet/thing, or a rocket. The Vikings might reflect material culture from any particular time within the Viking era. Heck, given that the Vikings did travel there should be a chance for some of them to reflect descent from some non-Scandinavian parentage (a very very small chance, but not zero). Given that Vikings travelled, it’s not crazy for them to be fighting the UFO in Anatolia, or the south of England, or in Sicily. But if the AI generated a picture of a merry band of polyracial Viking warriors, led by an African woman, three of whom are Han and one of whom is an aboriginal American wearing a head-dress while the UFO is an F-16 piloted by a white man — yeah, that AI would be biased, and in a weird and disturbing way. |