Breaking news: local idiot yells at train museum!
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Recently I was sitting on atrain, just minding my own business, looking out of the window and occasionally glancing at the passenger information screen. Suddenly an ad for Trainworld (The Train Museum at Schaerbeek station) popped up which used an image. I like the train museum, I really do, but at that moment I wanted to poke my eyes out.
(It was a black-and-white image of someone walking on train tracks)
Apart from the obvious safety-related issues with walking on a railway like this, I had a personal issue with this image. To me, a trained artist, this image was immediately obvious as an Ai-generated image. It makes a poor attempt at single point perspective and the lighting and shadows make no sense at all. Beyond that the image also make a few errors which can be spotted if you know anything about railways.
“So what?”, you may think. Usage of Ai is commonplace these days, for some reason everyone uses it. There is a larger issue here, Trainworld in Schaerbeek is a museum! Looking past the ecological and moral arguments against the use of Ai, the point of Museums is to be a centre of knowledge about a subject. But how can a museum claim to be a centre of knowledge on anything if it allows such a poor representation of a railway to pass? On top of that, this image was used to promote an exposition about the railway’s involvement during the second world war. Were they unable to find any historical pictures of this event in the various archives? I find that highly unlikely! And if the point of this image is to censor the horrors of war, then this is simply censorship. So if the purpose of a museum is to promote, share and advance the knowledge of it’s subject than Trainworld has failed to properly follow this purpose.
Occasionally I think about three years ago, when people still wrote their own things and payed artists for their images. And maybe, hopefully in the future, people will stop using it, and museums will go back to paying artists. But for now I will have to live with occasionally being flashed with that horrible Ai-image whenever I am on a train.
