But it's all fake. It's generated images. I guess I don't understand what people want out of the fake image generator. It will never produce anything historically accurate as a visual medium, because the images never existed.
At least with LLMs generating text you are more clearly communicating ideas that are intended to be interpreted by the reader, not imposing a concrete visual representation upon them.
> 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.
Obviously once you go back 200 years 99.9% depictions have to be fake and once back 2000 or so years an outright 100%. And everything that we do have is also cherry picked and faked, by the original authors, but still fake. Pictures are cherry picked (and we don't have any going back even a few centuries) and paintings are outright fantasy.
Just look what a giant Napoleon is in all his paintings (or even the size of his grave)
Napoleon was not actually short it was British propaganda based on the difference in length between the longer French and shorter British inch. The British took his measure in French inches and reported it in British and mocked his height. In fact he was actually taller than the average Frenchman at the time.
It’s not far off from Orwell’s 1984. It’s trite but it’s also true. They are writing history and erasing parts of reality.