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> On a completely different note, I am not sure what you’re getting at with the racial stuff What I am saying is that this sort of work can lead to people beli

> On a completely different note, I am not sure what you’re getting at with the racial stuff What I am saying is that this sort of work can lead to people believing these images as true, i.e. "this is what Roman Emperors looked like". If you ask an ML system to solve a problem for which the inputs cannot possibly determine the answer (i.e. the color of a fossilized animal or the skin color from a person's statue), it will give you a highly biased answer. I fear that some laypeople think of ML as "magic software that can do anything" without considering whether a problem is non-ambiguous given its inputs (e.g. something like object classification is less ambiguous than this problem). I'm not saying "burn it to the ground" - I wanted to learn more about what data and model was used to generate these images so that I might understand better where potential sources of racial / ethnographic bias might come from. > trying to find racial undertones in every tangential thing If you read my comments history you'll see that I'm no critical race theorist, nor do I discuss everything in a racial context. Out of curiosity, what "cause" are you talking about?

fit2rule 6y ago
>"this is what Roman Emperors looked like" The same can be said of the original advanced technology used to render a facsimile of the Roman Emperors, and in fact .. many stone sculptors have lost their prestige for the sake of this very same argument. Since culture is a lie which persists only in the telling, this IS what the Roman Emperors look like, now. You shouldn't resist that, because there is no truth on this issue, anyway.
- darkerside 6y ago
  Is there anything in the HN guidelines about willfully dismissing or obscuring the truth? This comment makes me feel like there should be. Saying "we'll never know anyway so stop asking" is abhorrent to me, and I imagine many on this forum. Not to mention it aims to end a discussion it doesn't understand.
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    Well, the sculpture is a fiction, and this AI generated image is a fiction - what's wrong with acknowledging that these fictions are all we have? Life is a collection of these facsimiles.
    - darkerside 6y ago
      Acknowledging that is fine. Saying that makes further conversation irrelevant moves us in the wrong direction as a society. Money is a fiction, history is a fiction, most scientific concepts eventually become fiction at a low enough level. And look at the world we've built on top of those fictions. It may not be perfect but it is undeniably meaningful.
      - fit2rule 6y ago
        How useful is it, then, to say .. "this is not accurate" .. well, there is no way to be sure. Ever. Unless .. you've got a time machine?
        darkerside 6y ago
        You'll never know with certainty, but you can certainly know more than you do now. But you won't if you don't pursue the truth, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. As I said in another post, maybe it's possible to sequence DNA of the emperor or a collection of contemporary subjects, determine an approximate ethnic makeup, and revise the images based on that. Or, we can just assume we are already correct because we'll never know anyway.
  - COGlory 6y ago
    I don't think the parent comment was saying "stop asking" merely that "the answer is unobtainable, so any discussion about it is going to be grounded on that"
fauigerzigerk 6y ago
I agree. I think the problem very much starts with the sculptures themselves. It seems rather likely that the sculptors would have had an incentive to "improve" some of the not so attractive features of those very powerful men. A realistic ML model could theoretically compensate for that by reintroducing a bit of variability based on the variability we see in today's population of that region.
- rbecker 6y ago
  Given the historical record, assuming the population remained the same is not even remotely warranted.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    It certainly hasn't remained exactly the same, but there could be quite a bit of similarity left: It is generally agreed that the invasions that followed for centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire did not significantly alter the local gene pool, because of the relatively small number of Germanics, or other migrants, compared to the large population of what constituted Roman Italy. In 2008, Dutch geneticists determined that Italy is one of the last two remaining genetic islands in Europe, the other being Finland. This is due in part to the presence of the Alpine mountain chain which, over the centuries, has prevented large migration flows aimed at colonizing the Italian lands[1] The migrants comprised war bands or tribes of 10,000 to 20,000 people,[5] but in the course of 100 years they numbered not more than 750,000 in total,[citation needed] compared to an average 40 million population of the Roman Empire at that time.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period
    - rbecker 6y ago
      That's Roman Italy - but what about North Africa and the Middle East, which were large parts of the Roman Empire?
- michaelmior 6y ago

fit2rule 6y ago

>"this is what Roman Emperors looked like" The same can be said of the original advanced technology used to render a facsimile of the Roman Emperors, and in fact .. many stone sculptors have lost their prestige for the sake of this very same argument. Since culture is a lie which persists only in the telling, this IS what the Roman Emperors look like, now. You shouldn't resist that, because there is no truth on this issue, anyway.

darkerside 6y ago
Is there anything in the HN guidelines about willfully dismissing or obscuring the truth? This comment makes me feel like there should be. Saying "we'll never know anyway so stop asking" is abhorrent to me, and I imagine many on this forum. Not to mention it aims to end a discussion it doesn't understand.
- fit2rule 6y ago
  Well, the sculpture is a fiction, and this AI generated image is a fiction - what's wrong with acknowledging that these fictions are all we have? Life is a collection of these facsimiles.
  - darkerside 6y ago
    Acknowledging that is fine. Saying that makes further conversation irrelevant moves us in the wrong direction as a society. Money is a fiction, history is a fiction, most scientific concepts eventually become fiction at a low enough level. And look at the world we've built on top of those fictions. It may not be perfect but it is undeniably meaningful.
    - fit2rule 6y ago
      How useful is it, then, to say .. "this is not accurate" .. well, there is no way to be sure. Ever. Unless .. you've got a time machine?
      - darkerside 6y ago
        You'll never know with certainty, but you can certainly know more than you do now. But you won't if you don't pursue the truth, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. As I said in another post, maybe it's possible to sequence DNA of the emperor or a collection of contemporary subjects, determine an approximate ethnic makeup, and revise the images based on that. Or, we can just assume we are already correct because we'll never know anyway.
- COGlory 6y ago
  I don't think the parent comment was saying "stop asking" merely that "the answer is unobtainable, so any discussion about it is going to be grounded on that"

fauigerzigerk 6y ago

I agree. I think the problem very much starts with the sculptures themselves. It seems rather likely that the sculptors would have had an incentive to "improve" some of the not so attractive features of those very powerful men. A realistic ML model could theoretically compensate for that by reintroducing a bit of variability based on the variability we see in today's population of that region.

rbecker 6y ago
Given the historical record, assuming the population remained the same is not even remotely warranted.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  It certainly hasn't remained exactly the same, but there could be quite a bit of similarity left: It is generally agreed that the invasions that followed for centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire did not significantly alter the local gene pool, because of the relatively small number of Germanics, or other migrants, compared to the large population of what constituted Roman Italy. In 2008, Dutch geneticists determined that Italy is one of the last two remaining genetic islands in Europe, the other being Finland. This is due in part to the presence of the Alpine mountain chain which, over the centuries, has prevented large migration flows aimed at colonizing the Italian lands[1] The migrants comprised war bands or tribes of 10,000 to 20,000 people,[5] but in the course of 100 years they numbered not more than 750,000 in total,[citation needed] compared to an average 40 million population of the Roman Empire at that time.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period
  - rbecker 6y ago
    That's Roman Italy - but what about North Africa and the Middle East, which were large parts of the Roman Empire?
michaelmior 6y ago