Can we chat a sec? Many friends and family have sent me the new AI-produced portraits of Roman Emperors. I don’t wish to share the project or even the picture because I find it dangerous to reconstruct skin tones, especially when we don’t know most of them from literature or art.

I am scared that non-experts and eventually white supremacists will take these portraits as canon truth and again use these conjectures (as they did with white sculpture) to prop up their own racist views of the ancient Mediterranean.

We already know AI can be and in fact historically is biased against BIPOC. But people likely won’t consider this and will think machines are not racist when using this reconstruction. But! Please read @safiyanoble’s groundbreaking work about this. https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/

In conclusion? I wont disseminate or prop up a project that will likely be used to further promote the false whiteness of antiquity—and thus continue to argue for the supremacy of whiteness today.

Please consider doing the same & please stop emailing me about this project. Thx.