Gen AI

The Fall of Man

March 10th, 2024

The Fall of Man (1616) by Hendrick Goltzius hangs in the National Gallery of Art, in the West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 45. You can check it out next time you're in DC.

Or, you can see it online from the comfort of your home, where you'll also find a lovingly detailed, 454 word description of the piece. (For reference, the Gettysburg Address is 272 words.)

Or, if you're driving, or visually impaired, you can spend two and half minutes listening to the description of the painting in spoken English.

Take a listen-

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What did you picture?

Was it this?

Did you really picture Adam with a belly button? What's up with that? Or did you picture more cats, more abs, more incredible beasts? Dall-e did!

The image depicts a fantastical scene heavily inspired by the Garden of Eden narrative. In the center, there are two human figures resembling classical representations of Adam and Eve, reclining under a tree. A serpent wraps around the bough of the tree, which is laden with apples, suggesting the temptation scene from the Biblical story. Various animals populate the scene, including a bison to the left, an antelope, and even a mythological-looking creature that blends characteristics of different animals, such as an antelope and a goat. In the foreground, two cats rest near an assortment of fruits. A human skull rests amidst the foliage at the bottom of the image, possibly symbolizing mortality or the consequences of the fall of man. The background features a lush landscape with trees, a river, and mountains under a sunset or sunrise sky. Birds are flying in the sky, and there's an idyllic atmosphere to the scene despite the presence of the skull. This image blends elements of nature with allegorical and mythological implications.

Since there was something lost in translation, despite the exhaustively precise prompt, I was curious how ChatGPT itself would have described the original. I passed the painting to the (somewhat) new Vision API and asked AI to describe what it saw. ChatGPT used a third fewer words, and focused more on the emotional and cultural content than on the physical characteristics.

For instance, ChatGPT immediately anchors the setting to the biblical Garden of Eden. Neither the bible nor the Garden are mentioned at all in the original description. ChatGPT notes the intimacy of their eye contact and physical touch. There are no emotional descriptors in the original.

ChatGPT seems to mix up their genders, which is an interesting lapse. Here, its recognition of the Adam and Eve story didn't help it disambiguate who was offering the apple to whom.

_{This image is a classic painting depicting two nude figures who are suggesting the biblical characters Adam and Eve from the Christian creation narrative. The two individuals are in a garden setting, which can be inferred as the Garden of Eden, and they are engaging intimately with one another with eye contact and physical touch. The man appears to be holding a fruit, often interpreted as the forbidden fruit, and offering it to the woman}
_{In the foreground, a cat-like animal is lying beside the figures, and in the background, we see more animals, such as a goat and another darker creature, which might symbolize the presence of other living creatures in the Garden of Eden. The setting includes trees, bushes, and a distant landscape that contributes to the serene and idyllic atmosphere typically associated with depictions of Eden. The painting style, the finesse in rendering human anatomy, and attention to detail reflect the techniques of classical European art.}

I piped ChatGPT's description back into Dall-e. While Adam gained a leg, a lot of the intimacy and tenderness of the original came back. Eve doesn't care about the leg, look at how she's holding his hand.

This image is a classic painting depicting two nude figures who are suggesting the biblical characters Adam and Eve from the Christian creation narrative. The two individuals are in a garden setting, which can be inferred as the Garden of Eden, and they are engaging intimately with one another with eye contact and physical touch. The man appears to be holding a fruit, often interpreted as the forbidden fruit, and offering it to the woman. In the foreground, a cat-like animal is lying beside the figures, and in the background, we see more animals, such as a goat and another darker creature, which might symbolize the presence of other living creatures in the Garden of Eden. The setting includes trees, bushes, and a distant landscape that contributes to the serene and idyllic atmosphere typically associated with depictions of Eden. The painting style, the finesse in rendering human anatomy, and attention to detail reflect the techniques of classical European art.

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Also note that this time, the knowledge of Adam and Eve seems to have over-ridden the physical description. Here, Eve holds the fruit, even though the prompt explicitly specified that the "man appears to be holding a fruit...and offering it to the woman"

Next, I thought it'd be fun to explore how the painting evolved after several generations of this describe -> draw -> describe -> draw telephone game. I started with the image Dall-e drew from the original, human description, asked ChatGPT to describe it, and went from there.

In ten generations, Adam begat ... begat Noah. In my telephone game, it only took ten generations to flood Eden with rowdy boaters on Spring Break.

Adam and Eve climb the tree by the fourth generation and are gone by the sixth, when Eden's been gentrified. (Adam sulks in the branches while Eve rolls her eyes down below in the fifth, and some foot traffic starts to appear.) A few elephants first appear in the ninth generation, and by the tenth Eden is overrun by them.

Here's the full lineage, with each image accompanied by ChatGPT's description of it.

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