Duty Calls

In 2008, Randall Munroe published a cartoon called Duty Calls. It is memorable because most of us will have encountered people who feel that duty calls and that they must answer it immediately by correcting somebody online, and then carry on correcting them until they see sense.

   The cartoon also hits a nerve because, if we are honest, most of us have felt the call of that duty ourselves. I believe I have resisted it admirably over the years, although I once attempted to do battle with members of a religious cult when they added a lot of nonsense to a Wikipedia page I had painstakingly overhauled on their behalf. Personally, I thought this was an act of considerable generosity on my part, but they seemed to disagree, repeatedly. This taught me an important lesson: if you spend your afternoon arguing with a religious cult online, you have probably reached the point where you should go out for a long walk.

   Since then I have tried to follow a simple rule. If something on the internet annoys me, I scroll past it. If it annoys me more than that, I close the page. If it annoys me so much that I find myself composing a reply in my head while brushing my teeth, I take this as a sign that I should put on my walking boots. And then, about two months ago, I came across Mick Bean.

   Now, I am sure Mr Bean is a very nice chap. I imagine him as the salt of the earth: intelligent, artistic, capable of refined thought and feeling, and probably the sort of man who helps elderly neighbours with their shopping. But he has a blind spot. My blind spots include Strictly Come Dancing and golf. Mr Bean’s weakness happens to be historical integrity. And this is slightly unfortunate because he regularly posts on a Facebook group devoted to the history of my home county of Sussex. Here, he shares AI-enhanced versions of genuine historical postcards and photographs.

   At first I ignored him. Then I became mildly annoyed. Then I became considerably annoyed. Then I found myself composing a reply in my head while brushing my teeth. . . . This is how trouble begins. Nobody wakes up one morning and says, ‘Today I shall become an obsessive internet pedant’. But later that day you are sitting at the kitchen table explaining to your wife that someone you don’t know is misrepresenting two men who, a hundred years ago, rode a horse and cart up Burgh Hill at Etchingham.

   I don’t know Etchingham particularly well and I certainly never knew the two men. But it struck me that they were real people who had actually been at Burgh Hill on that particular day in front of a photographer, presumably with no expectation that a century later artificial intelligence would decide it didn’t like their faces.

   Unfortunately, the venerable old gentleman with the beard was replaced by a younger, clean-shaven whippersnapper, while his slightly frightening looking companion was transformed into a more rounded and jolly-looking fellow.

   Their alteration is a pedantic point, I admit, but good history is pedantic. You might as well say that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1067, because it is close enough. You still get the general idea that it was a long time ago. But it was 1066, and there is no point having a historical record if we are going to ignore it. Replacing two real men in a horse and cart at Etchingham is little different from discovering that somebody had restored the Bayeux Tapestry by inserting a few better-looking Normans.

   

 

   So I did my duty, and I commented, and there followed a spirited discussion. I gave Mr Bean a bit of a hard time, I confess. To give him his due, he explained that enhancing old black-and-white, grainy photographs—sharpening them, colourising them and generally making them look more immediate—helped him gain a greater and more immediate understanding of the past. Presumably it is like watching Mel Gibson at the cinema and feeling you’ve got to know the real Braveheart. I can understand this to a certain extent; some people have an imagination, and some don’t.

   Eventually, with the help of the admins, we reached a compromise, and as everyone knows, if nobody is entirely happy, there is a reasonable chance that it is the correct course of action. Mr Bean agreed that whenever he posted an AI-enhanced postcard or photograph, he would make this clear. And peace broke out.

   He now posts both the original and the enhanced image, arguing that those who don’t like AI images don’t have to look. It is rather like the adverts for Nordic Socks I have to scroll past. And then he posted a photograph from a newspaper, probably taken at Rottingdean early in the twentieth century--enhanced by AI:

AI-enhanced

And he grudgingly included the original to keep the purists and pedants like me happy: 

 

Original

   Comparing the two pictures is fascinating. It is as though an historical re-enactment society has arrived to recreate the original photograph. They have done their best to match the actors with the people who once stood there, although the resemblances are necessarily approximate. The biggest problem seems to have been that they were one person short, and rather than admit this, they decided to replace one man, apparently called Colin Burnham, with a bathing-machine.

   Presumably the re-enactors happened to have several bathing machines to chose from, and selected the one which looked most like Colin. Unfortunately, two of the rejected bathing machines have been left in shot.

   The production also appears to have run out of rope for the recreation of the winch that is centre stage, so somebody has substituted a length of hosepipe. This gives me the nagging suspicion that the whole thing was staged in a garden centre.

   I happened to mention to a friend my problem with Mr Bean’s re-creation of the past, explaining that it risks tainting the historical record. Because that friend is a Beatles fan, he responded by sending me a photograph in which the heads of the four Beatles had been seamlessly swapped onto the bodies of the four members of the re-enactment society. I thought it was quite funny, but I studied it for a while and suddenly I understood Mr Bean’s point of view. Perhaps there is no point fighting AI? Perhaps history can be tidied up, improved and made more ‘relateable’:

 

 

If Mr Bean complains that his photo has been altered, I shall point out that he doesn’t have to look at it if he doesn’t want to—he can just scroll past. Or perhaps he would prefer it colourised? My friend also sent me a version with sixties psychedelic tints that really bring it to life, man.