The famous Spanish woman who spoiled Jesus has a host of successors today. So the history of architecture faces a strange future
In January, a parliamentary bill against falsification on the Internet was greeting the goose, but the Polish president deemed it censorship, vetoed it, and it began. To show him what he's made of, the web became infested with uncensored, perfect reworkings of photos of the president - solo and with his spouse. Undressed, half-naked, in sado-maso confections, whatever anyone typed into the artificial intelligence prompt. Current politicians and their images I don't give a damn about, let them wear and just panties in the pictures, as long as they are polished. Worse with the falsification of news photos, like those with snow from Kamchatka, which allegedly reached the tenth floor where the highest six-story blocks of flats stand. But this, too, can still be defused on an ongoing basis, as quite a few fact checkers are involved in current affairs.
More difficult with the past: here there are few both guards and comparative material. So I don't give a damn about the alterations of archives, which - not infrequently out of a good heart (but out of a bad head) - are being pieced together using AI by various enthusiasts. They swell the number of alterations of old photos of architecture, streets, squares, city views and even maps and plans. Alterations like from Jehovah's newspapers. The golden sun shines at its best, every tree is an oak tree, the people are smoother, the inscriptions can be read, although they often make no sense. The only thing missing is a wolf kissing a kid. What's unclear, Artificial adds; what's black and white, he colors, what - according to the prompt's author - is wrong, he corrects. To this are added seemingly archival films based on old photographs. The public likes it, passes it on and chills that it once was. After all, a nice, albeit artificial view does such a job with brains that it invalidates and replaces its imperfect, closer-to-truth version; and even if it doesn't invalidate, it makes a type to be trusted in a limited way - even though the type is more authentic and has important things to convey.
After all, in old photos and videos that have found their way online from private and public archives, that extra mine of knowledge about space and architecture, the most valuable things are sometimes the unobvious details: the type of car or streetcar, the name of a street, a sign, a typeface, some undressed pigsty in the yard. Seemingly nothing, but it helps to establish chronology, complete incomplete documentation in the archives or detect that old documents or the press were lying like dogs. And it is these details that AI most often removes or reworks during the seemingly innocuous coloring with smoothing. It's no use asking the authors (principals?) of the alterations, since they have to sugarcoat everything, to at least point out that this is the work of AI. A greater falsification of the "source," a type wrote me, is to upload black and white photos, the world does not look like this, I fix these falsifications.
Another type, on a scan of a map from the mid-19th century, changed the names of suburban towns and cities to "proper" German-sounding names. The Germans were unable to pronounce the Polish names, he concluded after 170 years, so they certainly didn't use them. He cited Wikipedia, old postcards and the logic of his own guesses. In doing so, he mixed names from two centuries that have no right to meet on one real map. Everything was so neatly cobbled together by AI that even an expert won't immediately pick up an obvious falsehood. We have it as in the bank that in a few years such "archives" of digital icing will be circulating on the web as sources and reliable documents. Their creators are worthy successors of Cecilia Giménez, the famous Spaniard who died in January, the one who - in good faith - fourteen years ago so restored a church fresco that Jesus looks like he was sucked down a sink drain and is that Jesus is still a meme today. So much so, Señora Giménez's redesign showed right away that something was amiss. In today's transformations, seams are rarely seen, so precisely sews the AI needle, heaven (hell) more effective than the old needle of retouchers. It used to be that people could be made into a horse by a select few with talent and equipment, including architects with their veined visuals. Today, everyone. And since everyone, the Ministry of Truth, which changes the past, is being played with not by the demonic AI itself or the Big Brother who manages it, but by a host of good-hearted volunteers who "fix the forgeries." Thanks to them, authentic photos and film accounts will be washed over the Internet with a flood of beautiful corrections to the bottom of the search lists, as long as the search engines are sharpened and everything is not referred to us by Artificial - largely based on the production of its own and other artificial colleagues. Hope supposedly in paper and print, but even here it can be funny, as evidenced by a high-profile recent book on conspiracy theories by Karolina Opolska, full of references to non-existent sources most likely invented by AI. Opolska has so far failed to come up with a conspiracy theory that someone tossed her fabricated footnotes.
But enough grumbling, let's look for the pluses. Back to dismantling. This time not of the president, but of buildings - also, like him, in their prime. Recently, the trend has gained momentum, and not only in the capital, where they are demolishing even ten-year-old, fully operational buildings. In Krakow, they have just gutted the solid interior of the former Miastoprojekt, which can also be considered "correcting" history, especially since Miastoprojekt was built in very inappropriate times. It's better to correct history in pictures only. As the disassemblers get above it online, maybe they'll shy away from it in real life.
Falsehood also has constructive consequences. In the United States in the 1930s, oil companies invested crores in creating proprietary road maps. One of them, in order to catch the competition in plagiarism (cartographers were expensive), put the name of a non-existent place on the plan. Years later, he found it on a competitor's map and was already rolling out the legal cannon when it turned out that the place had materialized. Someone had built a popular inn store along the road, and had taken its name from the map-box. It's tempting to draw at least one fictional, decently designed neighborhood with available housing on the plan of every Polish city today. Maybe someone will finally build it, too.
Jakub Głaz
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