Exploring AI's take on how Europeans perceive Americans, these images reflect the tool's interpretations by state. The results range from hilarious to somewhat accurate, providing a playful glimpse into the AI's perspective on American culture through a European lens. Take a humorous journey through these AI-generated portrayals that capture the essence of this unique cross-cultural perception.
Alabama
In the lens of AI-guided European perceptions, Alabamians are whimsically portrayed as rugged, elderly individuals. The comical depiction features an older gentleman with deep blue eyes, scraggly facial hair, and a few missing teeth—a character with a story to tell. The weathered white tee that AI clothes him in seems to have seen better days.
Imgur.com
However, this depiction doesn't quite mirror the reality of the Heart of Dixie, which boasts a rich history and a diverse populace with a median age of 38. While the state undeniably exudes southern charm, AI's imaginative portrayal adds a wild touch to the perception of Alabama. READ MORE...
One weekend, I found my younger son at the kitchen table, carefully writing out everything he knew about the Olympian gods for his school homework. His brow was furrowed, and he trained his eyes on the page with a level of concentration that I wish he would pay to his maths homework. So I asked him—casually, I thought—why he was so interested in the ancient Greeks. He beamed up at me with an angelic smile and answered, “Because that’s what you study, Mama.”
At this point, my heart nearly burst with parental pride. I am a Professor of Classical Archaeology and the ancient Greeks are, quite literally, my bread and butter. But my heart sank when my son added as an afterthought, “and because the Greeks gave us Western Civilization.” Buckle up, kid, I thought, you’re in for a lecture.
I wanted to tell him that the ancient Greeks did not give us Western Civilization. That there is no golden thread, unfurling unbroken through time from Plato to NATO. That we in the modern West are not the heirs of a unique and elevated cultural tradition, stretching back through Atlantic modernity to Enlightenment and Renaissance Europe, and from there through the darkness of the medieval period and ultimately back to the glories of classical Greece and Rome.
For most of us, it seems normal—even natural—to think of Western history in these terms. Unthinkingly, we assume that the modern West is the custodian of a privileged inheritance, passed down through a kind of cultural genealogy that we usually refer to as “Western Civilization.”
It is a version of history that is all around us, set out in popular textbooks, encoded implicitly into children’s stories and Hollywood movies, and proclaimed loudly and sometimes even angrily by commentators on both sides of the political spectrum. But it is a version of history that is simply wrong.
Research points to a different version of Western history. I have myself spent two decades of my professional life uncovering how ancient Greeks and Romans were much more diverse than we might think. They were neither predominantly white nor predominantly European, and indeed did not conceive of racial and geographical categories in the same way that we now do. As a result, the monks of western Europe, laboriously copying Latin manuscripts in their dusty scriptoria, were not the only medieval heirs of classical antiquity.
So too were the merchants of fourteenth century Sudan, conducting their trade in Greek; and so too were the Buddhist sculptors of northern India and Pakistan, who drew on the artistic traditions of the Indo-Greek kingdoms.
But perhaps the greatest centre of medieval classical learning when it came to the sciences was in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, where classical scholarship was fused with new philosophical and scientific developments drawn from across Asia, Africa, and Europe.
Put simply, the real history of the West is much richer and much more complex than the traditional grand narrative of Western Civilization acknowledges. It is not a golden thread but a golden tapestry—in which strands of diverse peoples, cultures, and ideas have been woven together over the centuries.
Our notion of Western Civilization is then demonstrably wrong, proven to be factually incorrect again and again by the mounting weight of historical and archaeological research. So where did the idea come from anyway? And why do we still cling to a version of Western history that we know to be untrue? READ MORE...
