Echoneo Chronicles: Prompts, Policies, and Millennia of Irony

Echoneo Chronicles: Prompts, Policies, and Millennia of Irony

While working on the Echoneo project, attempting to create echoes across art history in collaboration with artificial intelligence, we often encounter unexpected and thought-provoking obstacles. One of the most interesting of these involves AI image generators' content policies and how these policies can clash with clear artistic intent.

We faced this situation particularly when creating prompts involving Ancient Greek art concepts or styles. Our goal was to capture the essential characteristics of Greek art – idealized forms, anatomical proportions, mythological or athletic figures. However, no matter how carefully we phrased it, our prompts containing terms like "human figure" or "anatomy" were sometimes rejected by the AI, citing "content policy violations."

Historical Context and Modern Paradox

This situation holds an irony worth pondering. When we look at humanity's earliest artworks, such as Paleolithic cave paintings or figurines, we see the human body, nudity, and even reproductive organs depicted without today's sense of taboo, perhaps in a natural or ritualistic context. In Ancient Greece, the idealized nude body was an expression of human potential, beauty, and areté (excellence).

Over thousands of years, humanity, while evolving "civilization," seems to have developed a complex web of taboos, shame, and control mechanisms surrounding its own body and sexuality. To suppress and control sexuality, moral codes, religious institutions, laws, and now, digital content policies have been continuously produced and refined.

The AI Filter Dilemma and Echoneo's Experience

Of course, the safety filters in modern AI models have a purpose. Preventing the generation of harmful content (violence, hate speech, child exploitation, non-consensual sexual content, etc.) is absolutely necessary. The current technology, however, means these filters often struggle to distinguish nuance and context.

Consequently, legitimate artistic, historical, or educational content (like a Greek sculpture study targeting anatomical accuracy or a medical illustration) can potentially be flagged as "objectionable." The AI cannot always understand the critical difference between artistic nudity and harmful content.

We frequently encountered these filters while trying to generate Ancient Greek styles ([X, 2]) or concepts ([2, Y]) for Echoneo. This required us to carefully rewrite prompts, use more indirect terms like "stylized form" or "proportion" instead of "anatomy," and sometimes even explicitly state figures were clothed – contradicting some authentic Greek depictions. This shows that collaborating with AI is a dialogue with not just technical, but also cultural and ethical layers.

The Millennial Irony

And here lies the ironic point: Over the past millennia, while we as a society haven't been overly successful in eliminating murderers, thieves, or liars, we seem to have dedicated significant energy and technology – now embedded even in AI filters – to controlling depictions of the human body and censoring potentially "provocative" elements (a nipple, a depiction of sexual organs).

In the past thousands of years, murderers are still murderers, thieves are still thieves, liars are still liars, but thankfully we don't get aroused by seeing a nipple or a sexual organ anymore :)

This situation raises thought-provoking questions about our societal priorities, which are even reflected in our technological tools.

Conclusion

The Echoneo project not only explores the intersection of art history and AI but also reveals the practical and philosophical challenges of working with these technologies. Content policies and filters represent a complex balance, carrying the potential both to provide necessary protection and to restrict artistic expression and historical representation. This is an ongoing and important part of creative collaboration with AI that requires careful navigation and continued discussion.