AI Generated Images Lack Historical Accuracy (Battle of Britain example)

Recently, during a Quora discussion of the Battle of Britain (air war, early 1940s), a AI generated illustration of a scene from that encounter was used, as shown below (the photo was supposed to show a squadron of Hurricane fighters climbing to meet the enemy, I believe).

A Quora user asked the original poster (who used this image for the post) the question below.

Question: Why would you use AI to draw something that doesn't even vaguely resemble a hurricane?

A Respondent Agreed: Yes. Those images fail to resemble anything that ever flew in WW2. Irritating.

My (hopefully) helpful response to this AI related issue:

AI just recognizes words in the prompt (actually, it just operates on statistical correlations among character strings), then makes up a picture based on images associated with those words. So, it may have ‘read’ “Battle of Britain”, then composed a picture of a plane that was associated with that phrase and others. Those images could have been Spitfires, 109s, Hurricanes, 110s, or almost any WW2 plane, really. Then it creates a sort of collage image, based on that (i.e. from bits and pieces of those other images).

I put together a series of photos, mostly taken from actual pictures take during the war, to further explain this.

As you can see, the AI picture looks quite a bit like a WW2 fighter of the era, but not exactly like any of the aircraft that actually participated in the battle.

It is somewhat like the German BF 109. but the nose is too fat and it is lacking a strut connecting the wing at the tail to the fuselage. Plus, there is a big air scoop on the bottom of the fuselage, which the actual plane didn’t have, as is clear in the inset photo of the 109.
Clearly it is not supposed to be a BF 110 (not shown), as that was a twin-engine plane.
Similar remarks apply to the comparison of the AI plane and the British Hurricane (which has no weird scoop under the nose, which is also much sleeker than the AI plane.
And the AI planes look nothing like a British Spitfire, for the same reasons, as well as the different cover over the cockpit. Though the AI wings is mostly in profile, I think it is clear that these do not have the classic elliptical wings of the Spitfire.

So, it seems that the AI just created a fighter from bits and pieces of images of other planes. Which might not matter much in this case, but there are times that you really need accuracy, and you just can’t rely on using an image that an AI concocts, from bits and pieces. It can make you look sloppy (using an inappropriate image to go along with what you write) and might even have legal consequences (copyright, libel, etc.).

The text that the AI produces has a similar problem. It also gets pieces from here and there in its corpus, based on a statistical “next word” algorithm. But there is no understanding going on inside the AI, so you simply can’t trust the result. It might say anything, so you have to check it for yourself. In the famous words of Gorbachev, “trust but verify”. However, if you have to verify everything that a source tells you, it's not a very useful source.

On top of that, the algorithms might have peculiar ‘guardrails’ put in by the programmers, that can have unexpected results. For example, in this case there could be guardrails programmed into the AI about showing high technology associated with Hitler’s regime, for fear that people will say “oh cool, Nazi planes were great, we need a Nazi party too”. So, in order to protect people from this supposed risk, the AI might give you a picture of a German plane with British or American markings.

I expanded one of the AI generated planes to show this. There are vague markings on the craft, but it wasn’t clear what nation’s Air Force they were meant to represent. As you can see, the best that I could get out f the highly pixelated image, was a sort of “S” shape.

As you can see from the war-time photos of actual plane, the combatants weren’t shy about marking their aircraft. In fact, the national symbols (the British roundel and the German cross) were very evident. That was partly a result of the Geneva Convention, and also to avoid accidentally shooting down your own planes.So, it is interesting that the AI seemed to avoid using real markings, when the participants were definitely using very large and obvious markings.

Needless to say, this example is especially interesting in light of other recent complaints about the lack of historical accuracy in AI image generation. It is concerning that, over time, AI could rewrite history, and we might not even be aware of it. This is why we should never take anything written or drawn by AI seriously. It doesn’t really understand anything and on top of that, humans have also interjected their cultural preferences (“AI alignment”), which can have bizarre unintended consequences.

Or maybe these consequences are intended. Who knows, AI generative models are black boxes, built by corporations that have their own agendas and interests.

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And, since I have my own interests, I might as well plug a related book. :)

The Sappers' War: 12th Field Company Royal Canadian Engineers, Oct 1943 to Sept 1945

What follows is a review of the history of the 12th Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, primarily relating to the time that the company was in the Italian and Northwestern European theatres during World War II. Though the book focuses on the experiences of a particular company of Canadian military engineers, it also discusses some of the wider issues of the second world war and how it affected the people who lived through the era, civilian and military. Among those are my father (a sapper or military engineer) and mother (a war worker in wartime Britain and ultimately a war bride).

Thus, this is meant to be an informal and unofficial history of the company, written by an interested party in an effort to understand what these men went through during this period, and how that experience affected them and other people who lived through the war. The military aspects of the company's history are there (e.g. fighting, building bridges, detecting mines, maintaining routes), as are the cultural factors that influenced them and their times (e.g. the movies that they watched, the drinking they did, the many diseases they faced, their interactions with the Italian, British and other civilians that they lived among, their worries for the future). Some focus on life on the British home front is also given, via the experiences of my mother and her family.

Since many people had family and relations that lived during this time, it is my hope that the account will be of general interest to them, and to any that have a particular interest in this critical interval in history. Also, though the text relates specifically to Canadian sappers, I believe that many of the experiences will be common to the soldiers and loved ones of other nations who lived through the war, especially Americans and those from Britain and the British Commonwealth.

The primary sources of this document are the 12th Field Company War Diaries and related orders, with some material from The History of the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers, Volume 2 as well as various official histories by the Department of National Defence. Various other published sources are used as well, especially when discussing the wider issues of the war or the army experience (e.g. Churchill’s history of the war) , or conversely when relating very specific episodes of the war (e.g. Popski’s Private Army in late 1944). Personal accounts of my father’s or mother’s stories also augment the narrative. I have tried to fit those in during appropriate time periods, though some stories are more general and have therefore don’t necessarily relate to the time period being discussed. Nonetheless, they do help capture the essence of “being there” during the war years.

The War Diary is a day by day account of the primary activities of a given unit, as recorded by personnel in the headquarters staff of that unit, and signed off by the commander of the unit. As such, it is an official record, though the writers often brought a bit of their own character into the document. Naturally, as a relatively brief document it can’t hope to capture the complexity of the individual stories of 280 or so men, so the family lore generally has no corresponding entry in the War Diary, though there are sometimes tantalizing hints and near-verifications of these personal accounts.

There are a number of other sources for the book, from official histories to popular history books. I include quotations and references from these works (an eclectic mix), as I believe that they also shed light on different aspects of this period of time, and besides that, are just interesting accounts, in and of themselves.

U.S.: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

U.K.: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Spain: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B09HSXN6Q2