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Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History
Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse
Wrapped up in the thrill of discovering this new, delightful art and securing versions of it to gaze at while stirring tea in the morning, my dark, skeptical, spidey-senses failed to engage. The sort of world where it is trivial to prompt a neural network to create an image that pulls on the traditional patterns, subject matter, and motifs of William Morris, but layered with the hyper-realistic, high-definition, pixel-perfect asethetics of the modern web; dramatic lighting and sweeping landscapes ripped from ArtStation, meticulously art-directed details from Wes Anderson film stills, the two-tone color overlays and soft glow effects popularised on Instagram and Pinterest. What happens to the next generation of gullible idiots, when they ask their AI assistant to show them “william morris prints,” and those keywords have already been tainted by the sea of Etsy images?
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