Convergence

The National Gallery of Art doesn't offer a description for Prometheus Making Man and Animating Him with Fire from Heaven, so I asked ChatGPT to describe it. Then I asked Dall-e to draw that description, and asked ChatGPT to describe it, and on and one.

This time, the image departs from the original pretty quickly, then converges on a really stable, and spooky, one.

The original illustrates the myth of Promotheus, making man by animating him with stolen fire from heaven.

ChatGPT mistakes the scene for the Garden of Eden, and exaggerates that "in the background, a river runs through a wooded landscape." It hallucinates that two figures appear to be leaving on a boat in the upper left corner," but accurately notes that "in the clouds above... there's what seems to be a battle scene with armed figures on chariots and horses."

Those elements--especially the river, the people in a boat, and the wooded landscape--quickly dominate the next generations. The next generations then quickly converge on small variations of the same scene: a boatful of people in a canal that leads to some sort of a celestial light, while silent figures (sometimes angels, sometimes trolls) watch from its banks, surrounded by a dense dark forest. The 18th generation bookends the series perfectly: From the dawn of mankind, sparked with fire, to the placid end of days, parked in water, observed by mortuary statues of the angels and creatures of generations past.

Small coda, to rinse the melancholy mood:

The British Museum does include a description of the engraving on its website:

_{Prometheus standing at centre and making man by animating him with fire from heaven, in the foreground a monkey and a dog; Athena and Prometheus standing on a cloud at top while Prometheus lights a torch at Apollo's chariot; later state with numbers burnished; after Hendrik Goltzius. 1589 Engraving}

Giving that description to Dall-e leads to a much more accurate series of follow-up generations. But the first one is terrifying. Why did you decide to draw the monkey in the foreground that way?? Why is there a werewolf? And a chinchilla in the clouds? 🤣