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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.