Using AI to visualise historical figures
February 21, 2022 4:02 AM   Subscribe

Brazilian artist Hidreley Diao (@hidreley) has been using artificial intelligence (AI) to breathe photographic life into the portraits and sculptures of Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare and more, posting the fascinating results to his Instagram page. See also this twitter thread.
posted by contrapositive (27 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Damn, no wonder Antonio Vivaldi composed "Summer" from the Four Seasons - he'll raise temperatures all over! LOL.

Seriously, I try to approach these like the colorizations of vintage films - they're interesting and novel recreations that hopefully get you to think differently about historical reproductions, but at the end of the day they're representations and should not be taken as the be all and end all of how these figures "looked."

I would love to see a video explaining how this artist approached creating these figures.
posted by fortitude25 at 5:09 AM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]


So it seems Moe Syzlak is actually Rich Hall?
posted by Phanx at 5:56 AM on February 21, 2022 [6 favorites]


Turn Me Royal (best sellers).
posted by cenoxo at 6:14 AM on February 21, 2022


One interesting aspect of this is the decisions and (unconscious?) bias that goes into creating the context for the modern images - e.g. Julius Ceasar gets to be a suit and tie business exec.
posted by each day we work at 6:50 AM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]


So it seems Moe Syzlak is actually Rich Hall?

It is known. Turns out Ned Flanders is basically William H. Macy, too.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:31 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


Just FYI, there aren't any accurate images of Joan of Arc from her lifetime (or Zeus either, for that matter).

I do find these interesting and cool, but think fortitude25 has it - they're representations and should not be taken as 100% accurate. Personally, I'd love to see the figures in clothes from their own time periods to get a better sense of what they may have looked like. And I kind of hate myself for having that opinion - they're the artist's work and a fascinating project, and it doesn't matter how I'd like them to be different.
posted by FencingGal at 7:51 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


Shakespeare looks exactly like a stage director.
posted by Bee'sWing at 8:01 AM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]


Yeah, some of the non-white faces (especially the guys) have a slightly uncomfortable "satirical caricature comic strip from the 1940's" look about them, which I think goes to show how much exaggerating certain features and gender dimorphism is normalised in animated media.

(I'm going to resist the urge to go off on a tangent about whether using things like FaceApp and artbreeder on stock photography qualifies as creating art, but I will be grumpy at how many artists who do this don't bother crediting the photographers or naming the models for the non-stock photos.)

(Something something commodification of art for social media likes something.)

(Anyway, it's funny how far we've come from the first AI-generated portrait being sold for $432,500 and now anyone can produce this sort of thing with an app on their phone in about 5 minutes.)
posted by fight or flight at 8:05 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


What if Pocahontas was real? She was real!

Ben Franklin and Ken Paxton. Separated at birth?
posted by adamrice at 8:13 AM on February 21, 2022


I mean, is anyone here in danger of taking these things as 100% accurate? It seems like every time there's a thread about something like this, we get that warning from a few people, but, like, obviously? It's AI digital art, not time travel.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:18 AM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]


If anyone is curious, here is the process:

"The first thing to do is to find a real image similar to the statue. As I couldn't find it in any image bank, I used my girlfriend's face to bring the statue to life.

"Not that it looks like the picture, but the position of the face I managed to get it to perfection. I used Photoshop and the FaceApp application. In this process I superimpose the real image of the statue with the image used and I gradually bring it to life, always starting with the eyes."


I mean, it's a fun exercise, but there certainly isn't any insight to be gleaned from here based on this process.
posted by Think_Long at 8:57 AM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


There is a realistic painting of Van Gogh (by his friend John Russell) and it doesn't look at all like the AI version (notably the forehead, wrinkled and much higher in the AI).
posted by elgilito at 9:25 AM on February 21, 2022 [6 favorites]


How Accurate Are “Photorealistic” Portraits of Roman Emperors?, Tales of Time Forgotten, Spencer McDaniel, August 7, 2021:
In 2020, the digital artist Daniel Voshart [previously on Metafilter] used a neural net called Artbreeder to create a series of “photorealistic” portraits of fifty-four Roman emperors spanning from Augustus (ruled 27 BCE – 14 CE) to Carinus (who died in 285 CE). As the term “photorealistic” suggests, his portraits look almost like photographs. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not realize that these portraits are modern artistic impressions, not scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really historically looked like.

I’ve seen many people over the past year cite Voshart’s portraits and others like them as though they were authoritative, scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really looked like. In particular, I’ve noticed a worrying number of white supremacists trying to cite these kinds of portraits as “evidence” that the ancient Romans were all white. In this article I would like to discuss why Voshart’s portraits—and others like them—should be taken with several grains of salt….
posted by cenoxo at 9:29 AM on February 21, 2022 [8 favorites]


Personally, I'd love to see the figures in clothes from their own time periods

I would like that, but I like this too. It kind of makes me "see" the people I see every day differently. There are a lot of potential George Washingtons and Mozarts in my neighborhood convenience store. These are better and more charitable "stories" than the ones I usually involuntarily assume about random people, so maybe it changes me for the better?
posted by ctmf at 10:06 AM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]


Shakespeare has an impractically huge truck for living in the city though, for no apparent reason. And nobody's sure if Van Gogh is homeless or not, but he isn't bothering anyone and seems ok.
posted by ctmf at 10:10 AM on February 21, 2022


Personally, I'd love to see the figures in clothes from their own time periods to get a better sense of what they may have looked like.

Hadi Karimi does this, but with regular 3D art (ie: Maya, Zbrush, etc.) and not AI.

And I kind of hate myself for having that opinion - they're the artist's work and a fascinating project, and it doesn't matter how I'd like them to be different.

There are a number of artists whose work is similar- using AI and/or Photoshop to recreate past figures- and they often use modern clothing to approximate the verisimilitude. Like this one.
posted by ishmael at 10:15 AM on February 21, 2022


there aren't any accurate images of ... Zeus ....

There's a pretty compelling reason for that
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:18 AM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]


there aren't any accurate images of ... Zeus ....

There's a pretty compelling reason for that


If I were the author, Zeus would be a bunch of unsolicited dick pics.
posted by Dr. Curare at 10:24 AM on February 21, 2022 [11 favorites]


Zeus & Hera (BMW USA, Feb 2022)
posted by cenoxo at 10:25 AM on February 21, 2022


I'm just here to say that Beethoven could absolutely hit it
posted by potrzebie at 10:45 AM on February 21, 2022 [2 favorites]


These sorts of things are often trained on a modern celebrity face dataset, which probably tends to give a strong bias towards generating people who look like movie stars.

As a point of comparison, modern musicians are either a) pretty average looking schlubs or b) child stars chosen for looks who then branched into music. Go back a few hundred years and the pool of people rolling high scores for both superhuman talent and superstar looks is much smaller. And before tv, lacking in looks didn't matter as much.

The average Roman emperor may have had an uncommonly chiseled jawline to help their rise to the top... But probably not.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:03 AM on February 21, 2022 [4 favorites]


These look cheaply plastic and shiny. And obvious details like the width of noses and jawlines are just obliterated.
posted by juniper at 11:46 AM on February 21, 2022 [3 favorites]


Hmmm, I'm not that impressed by them. The one of Napoleon looks like some schlubby combo of Elijah Wood and Phil Collins. We actually have his death mask, which looks of course just like artwork drawn during his life (not to mention photos of his surviving sons) to have a pretty good idea of what he actually looked like.

So, yeah. I've seen better AI portraits of Napoleon, like this one here.
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 1:39 PM on February 21, 2022


Just FYI, there aren't any accurate images of Joan of Arc from her lifetime (or Zeus either, for that matter).

Also Caesar. Identification of Roman busts with Roman leaders has been... dodgy. There are statue bases labeled "Caesar" and there are Roman busts, but nobody has ever found a Roman bust with a Roman inscription identifying it as Caesar.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:46 PM on February 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


I'm just here to say that Beethoven could absolutely hit it

Baethoven
posted by Panthalassa at 10:16 PM on February 21, 2022


There is a realistic painting of Van Gogh (by his friend John Russell) and it doesn't look at all like the AI version (notably the forehead, wrinkled and much higher in the AI).

I mean, we have an actual photograph of Van Gogh at 19 years old. It seems like an AI could use that as a starting point...And yes, the John Russell.
posted by vacapinta at 5:00 AM on February 22, 2022


…AI portraits of Napoleon…

AI portraiture won’t be popular until it learns flattery (and politics) – Emperor Napoleon I, Jacques Louis-David (1807).
posted by cenoxo at 1:07 AM on February 23, 2022


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