What does an 1838 painting tell us about technological change?
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| Top Left: Liberty Leading the People (Delacroix, 1830) Top Right: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Friedrich, 1818) Bottom Left: The Fighting Temeraire (Turner, 1838) Bottom Right: The Third of May 1808 (Goya, 1814) |
For each of these paintings, I put the painting up a one screen and used the voice feature to have ChatGPT give me an overview of each, and then we would have a discussion about it where I would ask about various features. Ended up spending about an hour on each. Was it successful? I now know significantly more about the Romantic art period and these paintings, though of course not an expert. It was certainly a better and more enjoyable experience than freshman seminar course on art history I took in college.
Let discuss one of these paintings in more detail, the 1938 painting The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up by Joseph Mallord William Turner, on display at the National Gallery in London.
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| The Fighting Temeraire by J.M.W. Turner (click on picture for more detail) |
Much to love in the painting: the reddish sunset, the reflections of the boats in the water, the detail of the Temeraire and the lack of detail of the tug.
But also note the nod to technological change, the tall sailboat being taken to its end by a coal-powered tugboat, marking the new era of shipping vessels, the industrial revolution in full swing, and the beauty we lose to progress. Now a bad metaphor for the AI revolution of today.
If you want to learn more about the painting, you can watch this lecture from the National Gallery, or you could ask your favorite LLM.
There is a very interesting edition of the BBC program *In Our Time* on the painting, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b081r260. I have a print of it on my living room wall next to this one by Geoff Hunt, https://www.scrimshawgallery.com/product/heavyweight-punch/ , showing the ship behind the Victory ready to break the line. Good stuff.
ReplyDeleteWithout knowing anything about the topic and without any expert guidance, how do you know which parts of what you learned from the AI are correct versus which parts were totally made up BS that just sounds like it could have been correct? In reality, all its output is the latter, but its training set is so large that it often stumbles into outputting correct information.
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