Beware AI generated images of your criminal ancestors!

Eugenicist Hamish Maxwell-Stewart's AI fake photographs of 19th century Tasmanian convicts
Breaches of Moral Rights and Copyright of heritage property using AI generated data
Thomas J. Nevin's real photographs/mugshots of Tasmanian prisoners taken in the 1870s-1880s.



Source of talk at the National Family History Month - Opening Ceremony
- https://familyhistorymonth.org.au/index.php/videos/video/2023-opening-ceremony
Topic: Artificial Intelligence

PRETTY CARTOONS
Why would you accept an AI generated image of your deceased family member which was made from data taken from various unrelated photographic and non-photographic sources when you may already possess a real photograph of that person or their immediate descendant? Then don't. Protest about this to the National Trust of Tasmania, to the Australian Research Council and the Australian Copyright Council.

No extent of warnings that the images created are FAKE will ever account for Hamish Maxwell-Stewart's waste of public research money in this, his latest attempt at messing up the digital environment with FAKE images of your deceased family members which he has assigned to YOUR REAL FAMILY NAMES. These images are FICTIONS playing with eugenics and phrenology all over again, this time with a new toy called ChatGPT. The resultant image of YOUR CONVICT is a pretty cartoon akin to the coloured drawings created by Simon Barnard's representation of convicts in his illustrated book Convict tattoos : marked men and women of Australia, (Melbourne, Vic. The Text Publishing Company, 2016.) Website: https://www.simonbarnard.com.au/product/convict-tattoos/

In a new exhibition assisted by Andrew Redfern called UNSHACKLED (2023) proposed for the National Trust at the old Penitentiary, Hobart Gaol, Campbell Street, Maxwell-Stewart wants you to believe this nonsensical indulgence is worthwhile. No it isn't. It's a waste of time and money, with no authentic historical merit and no apology for any distress he is causing to bearers of those family names. He has created FAKE images of 19th Tasmanian prisoners to show YOU what your ancestor MIGHT have looked like, subsuming in the process those real photographs already extant in Australian public collections, correctly attributed to government contractor Thomas J. Nevin taken in the 1870s, and now building on a previous mess of FAKE and homogenised "Port Arthur offenders" images of 1870s prisoners he developed for an earlier exhibition held there at the Old Penitentiary in 2019.

The field called criminal anthropology (to which this project affects an affiliation) long ago discredited Lombroso's stereotype, the "criminal type", with Goring's study published in 1913 of  statistics gathered from 3000 prisoners in British prisons over a ten year-period:


Dr. Charles Goring, Deputy Medical Officer of H. M. Prison, London, in the Most Important Contribution of Recent Years to Criminology Upsets Accepted Theories Through Statistics Gathered from 3,000 Convicts.



"THERE IS NO CRIMINAL TYPE," SAYS PRISON EXPERT
THE NEW YORK TIMES
November 2, 1913, Sunday Section: Magazine Section, Page SM13, 4250 words
THE 'criminal type' is an anthropological monster. There is no such thing as a criminal type.' In other words, the criminal is a normal person, not markedly different from the rest of humanity who have managed to keep out of prison. In other words, there are in ministers and Cambridge undergraduates and college professors the making of pickpockets and thieves, as well as murderers and forgers...
Read about the REAL photographs of Tasmanian prisoners ("convicts" in tourism discourse) taken by government contractor Thomas J. NEVIN in the 1870s-1880:

- https://tasmanianphotographer.blogspot.com/2008/07/the-parkhurst-prisoners-anthropometry.html
- https://tasmanianphotographer.blogspot.com/2019/07/exhibition-2019-t-j-nevins-mugshot-of.html.
- https://prisonerpics.blogspot.com/.
- https://thomasnevin.com/category/19th-century-prison-photography/

Clip: Beware AI generated images of your criminal ancestors! #1



Clip uploaded to Thomas Nevin's Youtube channel:
- https://www.youtube.com/@klwnfcgroup/featured
- https://youtu.be/av_9D3mZ3wQ?si=-3Hmzr1syfiYEB5k

Note here Maxwell-Stewart's assumption that his gratuitous act of using the NAMES and photographic records of REAL people and their families to attach to his AI generated FANTASY IMAGES of their ancestors is perfectly fine. It is not. He is breaching their moral rights and their copyright.

TRANSCRIPT
0:00 so I wanted to quickly say a little bit
0:02 about how we're generating those images
0:03 so the the AI takes the physical
0:06 description from the record the age of
0:09 the prisoner and where they're born and
0:11 it matches them to 19th century prison
0:14 and other photographs that we've
0:17 harvested online now again as we get
0:20 better at this what I want to do is to
0:23 create our own
0:25 um resource of images
 0:28 um so that we can fine-tune this
0:31 experience but the images of individual
0:34 convicts have been created by merging
0:36 multiple photographs which share
0:38 characteristics with their record
0:41 and the faces that have been generated
0:43 are really quite striking so this is um
0:46 one we generated for William Allen and
0:48 again this is almost certainly not what
0:50 William Allen would have looked like but
0:52 I think it's it's best seen as the AI's
0:54 best guess at what he might have looked
0:56 like
0:58 and this allows us to um you know we're
1:01 playing around with slogans now for this
1:03 experience
1:11 and we can also do this so this is
1:13 Michael Heath who's one of our amazing
1:16 volunteers there are about 40 volunteers
1:19 who just pump data into various um
1:22 projects that digital history Tasmania
1:24 is focusing on
1:26 um Michael like many of you are the
1:27 volunteers who who spend time with with
1:30 DHT
1:32 um is a descendant of a convict and so
1:34 we fed his photograph into the AI and
1:37 this is the the image that the AI came
1:40 up with for his
1:42 convict ancestor and I think this gives
1:45 you an indication of how we can we can
1:47 get better at this image Generation by
1:49 seeding more and more photographs in we
1:52 want to use the photographs that James [sic - John]
1:55 Watt Beattie took uh Tasmanians in the
1:58 1890s because we'll know a lot about
2:01 their descent to fine-tune this process
2:04 um even further
2:07 and here you can see a whole lot more of
2:10 these and we're hoping that that this
2:13 the AI will provide a new way for
2:16 visitors to Hobart to engage with the
2:19 convict past and to actually understand
2:21 the work that family historians and
2:23 academic historians have done ...
Source: Beware AI generated images of your criminal ancestors! #1
Thomas J. Nevin: https://youtu.be/av_9D3mZ3wQ?si=-3Hmzr1syfiYEB5k

What is the point of this expensive project, apart from Maxwell-Stewart's personal motivation to prolong his academic career in the space of penal history? Attendees at this talk expressed strong misgivings that the CREATED IMAGES of their ancestors, using both mugshots and family photographs, will not be fully understood as AI FICTIONS when viewed and copied. These are some of their questions and responses from Maxwell-Stewart and Andrew Redfern:



Clip: Beware AI generated images of your criminal ancestors! #2
https://youtu.be/yhiCaXMadqk?si=3FGNzVZWBDVhjALp

TRANSCRIPT
0:01 uh where there are known photographs of
0:04 convicts I have one of a convict as an
0:06 older man could these be compared with
0:09 an AI generated image to test the
0:12 accuracy
0:15 um yes so one of the things that AI can
0:17 do is unage a photograph
0:20 and so
0:22 um yeah that's I think great potential
0:25 for using photographs taken at different
0:27 stages in life to try and reconstruct
0:31 what somebody might have looked like at
0:32 a younger age
0:35 and I think your example to Hamish of
0:37 the um your volunteer that you uploaded
0:40 his photo and then generated the
0:42 ancestor I think that's a great example
0:44 of that as well where the the two yes it
0:47 can sort of take Modern Images or other
0:49 images and then cross-reference and
0:51 correlate
0:54 and there's a great line in in the chat
0:56 as well for Maureen about
0:58 um how do we prevent these being passed
1:00 ff as the real images online and I mean
1:02 I think that's a that is a huge danger
1:04 and so as a community I think that we
1:06 have to construct guidelines for the use
1:10 of all of this
1:11 um you know when the penitentiary
1:14 experience on Chapel goes live we need
1:16 to have a
1:17 um a statement about how these images
1:19 were created and they're not what the
1:22 individual would have looked like but
1:24 it's using the best tools in order to
1:27 try and imagine what they might have
1:28 looked like
1:30 um and there's a a an interesting little
1:34 line from Michelle there as well which
1:36 um I totally agree with and we we tend
1:38 to We tend to there's a danger of
1:40 thinking that particularly paintings or
1:43 newspaper images of convicts that were
1:46 done at the time are the Real McCoy
1:49 whereas of course they are often very
1:52 strongly influenced by people's um
1:55 attitudes towards um convicts or people
1:58 of various classes or in different
1:59 people of different Sexes and so you
2:02 know using the originals doesn't
2:04 necessarily get us out of the minefield
2:07 hmm and Fran has also asked will the
2:11 images be marked saying that they're
2:13 produced by AI I guess that is related
2:17 to what tool you're using
2:19 yes most definitely we will
2:24 um yes and um that's been
2:27 um we're certainly working going back
2:31 now and doing any images that we've uh
2:33 generated through the Ironclad
2:34 Sisterhood project we're going to
2:36 explicitly have I mean it says it on the
2:38 web page that they're AI but we're
2:40 actually going to put it on each
2:41 individual photo as well so that if they
2:44 do get copied uh which I'm sure we've
2:47 all had that happen with you know people
2:49 copying things in online trees that at
2:52 least hopefully that will alert others
2:56 that they
2:57 um artificially intelligent intelligence
3:00 generated images
3:02 hmm
Youtube and transcript source:
Beware AI generated images of your criminal ancestors! #2
https://youtu.be/yhiCaXMadqk?si=3FGNzVZWBDVhjALp

RELATED POSTS main weblog

First published on
Categories and tags:: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)