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2 min readMar 19, 2026

It is a bit funny. The Python code appears to be what you actually wanted, if the code had been run. Try this one again, but do something like give it the negative and then the little Python program and just ask it to run the code. AI image generators are like idiot savants. They try their best to interpret prompts, but don't really have an understanding of the real world in the way you and I do. It didn't even notice that one arm in the photo was a child's. A human would have seen that immediately.

It also reminds me of the oddest test I read awhile back here on Medium. One of the generative AIs (I forget which one) can generate an image from a date and the longitude/latitude location coordinates. The author tested it with the date and location coordinates for the famous "golden spike" photo of the two legs of the US Transcontinental Railroad meeting in Utah in 1869. The photo the AI generated was absolutely wonderful ... except a lot of the details were wrong and simply invented! Just like the non-existent case citations lazy lawyers have gotten caught with. The problem, of course, is how absolutely convincing the hallucinations can be.

Addendum: I found the article — https://generativeai.pub/ai-generates-historical-images-from-gps-coordinates-f47874fa76a4

If you google for “generating AI images from historical date and location”, there actually are a number of historical image generators, but nearly all of them seem like just something you could easily do with a generalized nice — and free — (and quality) one like Google’s ImageFX, so they’re really just attempts to get you to pay for something you don’t have to. ImageFX can already do things like a psychedelic version of the famous portrait of the signing of the Constitution. The “full body tattoos” also added an interesting re-interpretation of history.

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John Levin
John Levin

Written by John Levin

Scientist. Writer. Meditator. Blue Tantrika. Mystical Rabbi. Climate & Human Rights Activist. I’m a man of few words, except when I open my mouth.