[I_HALF_CATS]

Creator here to answer: I have tried to make it clear in interviews these are not ground-truth representations.

"each step towards realism is likely a step away from ground-truth." via https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/peer-past-these-ph... & https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1292107503543689217

I have not in my Roman Emperor write-up itself been as overt. I thought it might be a bit too obvious. My writeups make it clear when no information about skin tone is available.

I did include such a clause in a forensic facial reconstruction experiment: saying: "My gut instinct is that the results are simply easier to look at, that each step towards realism is a step away from ground-truth skull measurements." because it was an experiment where there are likely living relatives.

https://medium.com/forensic-vr/ai-forensic-facial-reconstruc...

Proof: https://twitter.com/dvoshart/status/1294977757756227585

[ericjang]

Thanks Daniel for your response! I hope my GP comment didn't come across as hostile or discouraging to future artists who want to explore this kind of art. I want to be clear that I'm not offended by your work.

My discomfort stems more from my belief that a non-technical / layperson audience is much more likely to conflate "each step towards realism" with a "step towards ground-truth", the exact opposite to what you suggested. The writeups make clear when information is not available, but the artistic medium itself (a rendered still image showing only one possibility) does not showcase this.

> In response to Cocci’s findings, Voshart removed all mentions of the site and revised several portraits to better reflect their subjects’ probable complexions

You graciously made corrections for plausibly Nazi historical propaganda. However, not every artist/historian may elect to do this, out of scholarly pride or a personal politics or just laziness. The artist subsequently wields tremendous power over the images that show up on Google Image search, and their decisions may unintentionally contaminate future historical research by way of inducing subtle prejudices.

We live in an age of misinformation - and I think the information that must be protected most carefully is information of the past, specifically around people. DeepFakes of living celebrities are fairly easy to verify and disprove, but as soon as you go back ~5 decades or so, some people start to challenge whether certain events (Holocaust, Tiananmen Square Massacre) even actually happened.

Some ideas on how one might mitigate this:

- Provenance technology that shows the editing history (potentially including a MD5 of the dataset) of how an image was synthesized.

- A simple, unobtrusive watermark on the center of the image indicating that it is but one of N possibilities, where N gives a rough estimate of the entropy over the distribution. Sort of like the recycling triangle numbers.

- GIF form showing multiple possibilities given the data you have.

[I_HALF_CATS]

I think there is a grand misunderstanding around my use of machine learning. Your first two suggestions have an assumption that the images weren't heavily modified before going into Artbreeder which was usually the case. or modified in a circular manner, Artbreeder>Photoshop>Artbreeder>Photoshop any kind of MD5 is lost. I could show a progres of each but it is absolutely enormous. Potentially hundreds of decision trees.

As for GAN bias: once in Artbreeder the skin tone is entirely my choosing. If there is a bias in the depiction it is my own bias. There might be a slight bias towards a white, brow-haired female but is is more of a gravity that can be avoided with a bit of skill. There is also a challenge in hair that is -for lack of a better explanation- hair made with human intervention (braids, tall wigs, cornrows, dreads etc).

AS for your last suggestion: I've already been thinking of making videos that show a transition of skin ton of lightest plausible to darkest plausible. Tiberius for example I have a very compelling version as a pale-skinned white dude or a dark-skinned person who looks indian/pakistani. Done in paintover/colorization in Photoshop --directly on the bust- where proportions match.

In the second version of the poster I actually challenged myself to do at least do a quick depiction of each emperor with dark skin. Version 1 my approach was to assuming an average based on place of birth. This time I experimented with assume-darkest-features possible simply to test my assumptions and question my biases. Although quick and not robust, I think it was of value.