Nothing defines “anachronism” better than Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5:
The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nothing can show anachronisms better than an AI image generator that has absolutely no notion of historical accuracy. In other words, you troll the AI with a scene that could not exist in reality, and it will create the image without a second thought.
The idea came when I was taking the “zombie flight” to Brussels, to join the annual conference of the Directorate-General of Translation of the EC. The conference is called the Translating Europe Forum. I played with the thought of inviting, virtually of course, St Jerome to this event. St Jerome is, after all, an emblematic figure of translation — I would not call him patron saint because not all translators are Catholic. Read this blog I wrote years ago to find out why Jerome is so important for translation.
So, I thought, let’s create the anachronism and have St Jerome fly to Brussels on an early morning flight:
Me: Create a photorealistic image: The main hall of an airport building but dimly lit by candles. Mysterious dim yellow light comes from the floor. St Jerome walks through the hall, heading for a flight.
DALL-E has an interesting idea of a 4th-century saint, depicting them as church dignitaries from the Renaissance. That’s an anachronism that I didn’t even introduce in my prompt. But mentioning the saint and the candles did the rest of the work: the hall is actually a crossover between, well, an airport hall, and a weird cathedral lit up for the Easter vigil.
Let’s switch it up and throw in an airplane or two:
Me: Can you recreate the image so that the scene is the gate area of the airport? There is a glimpse of an aircraft through one of the windows. The aircraft is dark silver.
After this, I tried a few more things with these images, removing the candles, making the scene darker (because this is an early morning flight). But my biggest problem was the cardinal costume. St Jerome lived in the 4th century and had the reputation of a hard worker and an unhinged intellectual. So, I asked DALL-E to make him look more like a Franciscan monk.
I wasn’t satisfied with the result (and I’m not showing you those images), so I asked the AI to start over:
Me: Let us start over. St Jerome, dressed as a Franciscan monk, is waiting to board a plane. It is the gate area of the airport. The gate area is dimly lit, with mysterious dim jellow light coming from the floor. Two or three more people wait with St Jerome. Part of an aircraft can be seen through the window. It’s an A320. Outside it’s dark. The aircraft is dark silver.
This is the first example of what I do when I want to nudge DALL-E towards my idea. I take all the items I gradually introduced in the conversation, and put them in a single prompt. And DALL-E did what I wanted for the most part.
(Although I still don’t get this compulsion to put gibberish on the image. I never encountered an airport gate that was called DOSRT RE.)
The rest is coming from my affinity to more darkness (and also from the fact that this was supposed to be an early morning flight in a dark European November). I asked DALL-E to make the inside and the outside darker, and then the outside even darker:
After this I created a surrealist sequence as St Jerome made his way to Brussels. The next few posts will introduce this story.
thirdtower.ai 