An in-depth examination of how computer vision in AI is indebted to artistic ideals from the Enlightenment
When Dutch megabank ING launched a 2016 advertising campaign spearheaded by an AI-generated “next Rembrandt,” it demonstrated just how deeply Western assumptions about the history of art had infiltrated fledgling artificial intelligence technologies. Working backward from this computer-generated Old Master painting, Elizabeth C. Mansfield traces the history of computer vision (the branch of AI research concerned with visual perception, recognition, and design) back to Enlightenment fantasies of intelligent machines and artistic automata.
Through her inquiry in eighteenth-century European fascination with art-making machines, Mansfield connects centuries-old automata to contemporary AI systems like DALL-E and Midjourney, showing how the history of art abides as a ghost in the machine of computer vision. She documents the artistic ambitions, aesthetic experiments, commercial pressures, and crises of authenticity that occur during the development of a technology designed to emulate aspects of human visual perception.
An innovative art historical response to computer vision, Ground Truth offers important new directions for a renewed engagement with art’s humanist and digital generation history. At a time when the humanist enterprise is being questioned, Mansfield makes the different worlds of art history and computer vision mutually intelligible in this compelling account of both.
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