This submit was written by James Swensen, a Humanities Heart school fellow.
Final 12 months, I visited the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York Metropolis. As a scholar of American artwork from the Thirties, I used to be desperate to see the museum’s new exhibitions. I used to be happy, however not shocked, to see {a photograph} I knew effectively in a distinguished location on a wall devoted to the images created by the US authorities through the Nice Despair (Determine 1). I admit that it was like seeing an outdated buddy. Hanging amongst different iconic pictures of the period was the {photograph}, merely titled, “The arms of Mrs. Andrew Ostermeyer, spouse of a homesteader, Woodbury County, Iowa.”
The {photograph} was taken by Russell Lee in 1936 on his first touring project for the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration, later often known as the Farm Safety Administration or FSA (Determine 2). Lee was probably the greatest photographers of the 20th century. Right this moment, nevertheless, his is a reputation that not many individuals know, even when they know his work. He was tall, educated, and aristocratic in bearing, but he additionally had a capability to deeply join with the folks he encountered throughout the USA. He genuinely cared for these he photographed and believed that he may assist them by displaying them of their plight. This included Theresia Ostermeyer, a septuagenarian farmer dwelling in rural Iowa.
German immigrants from Bavaria, the Ostermeyers have been homesteaders who knew loss. That they had 5 youngsters, the final three of which didn’t survive to maturity. They misplaced one farm in Harrison County after World Warfare I and have been unable to take care of their second farm on the Little Sioux River practically 20 years later. The 12 months 1936, as their granddaughter recalled, “was the 12 months we dried out. We didn’t elevate any crop in any respect.”[1] Unable to repay their mortgage, they have been within the means of eviction when Lee discovered and photographed them. Theresia was 74 and her husband was 81.
Early on, Lee’s {photograph} of Ostermeyer’s cropped arms obtained reward. In 1939 the critic Elizabeth McCausland known as it “a human and social doc of nice second and transferring high quality.” She continued, “within the erosion of those deformed fingers is to be seen the image of social distortion and deformation: waste is to be learn right here, as it’s learn in lands washed right down to the ocean by floods, in mud storms and in drought bowls.”[2]
Many years later, Lee’s images of Ostermeyer’s gnarled arms continued to have a gravitational pull. I nonetheless bear in mind once I first skilled this {photograph} as an undergraduate BYU scholar sitting in a lonely cubical on the fifth flooring of the Harold B. Lee Library one night. I used to be simply starting my life within the forex and site visitors of pictures, and this {photograph} stood out; it pierced me in a means that few pictures ever have; it stung. It compelled me to motion and began me on the trail to being a scholar of FSA images. I have no idea if I might be the place I’m as we speak with out this {photograph}. In a really possible way, it additionally linked my love of images with my love for others. On my mission in Poland, I bear in mind shaking the arms of a girl within the doorway of the Warsaw chapel who, though a lot youthful than Ostermeyer, had the identical calloused, granite-like arms that have been a byproduct of a lifetime of arduous toil. In that second, I discovered extra in regards to the hardscrabble lives of these I used to be serving than by another encounter.
Fingers are consultant of what makes us human. There’s a medieval folks custom that claims that when the satan disguises himself in human type, he’s unable to correctly recreate arms and toes. He can not, as learn within the Doctrine and Covenants, even settle for mortal arms when supplied. Missing arms of his personal, he’s unable to carry out some of the elemental human engagements.
This motif of arms as a marker of humanity finds a curious parallel in trendy know-how. As you might be undoubtedly conscious, AI picture mills are making super strides in producing dynamic visible imagery. Even essentially the most opportunistic of us look with hesitation, concern, and pleasure to what DALL-E, Adobe Firefly, and different applications are making. But, there’s one necessary means wherein AI has not found out the way to replicate or recreate imagery: arms. In line with Peter Bentley, a professor of laptop science at College Faculty London, AI instruments “have discovered that arms have parts corresponding to fingers, nails, palms. However they don’t have any understanding of what a hand actually is.” “The machine’s failure is reassuring in a means,” he continued, “Fingers are a logo of humanity.”[3]
Shortly, nevertheless, these applications are catching up. With the prompts “Previous arms” and “Iowa Farm Girl,” DALL-E generated this picture (determine 3), which reveals that AI could have gotten higher at creating practical arms. Nevertheless it additionally reveals that there are issues that it can not perceive. Regardless of revealing the wrinkles of age (and job on the costume), these arms are too fairly, too good, and framed by a super image of lots. As a simulation, it’s good; as a picture of life, it’s incomplete and inconsistent at greatest. The pc-generated arms of a girl who by no means existed can not seize or reveal what the precise flesh-and-bone arms Lee photographed in 1936 did. It can not seize the pressure of arduous labor, the disjointedness of age, and the ache of dislocation. It struggles to create a picture of empathy. No program is daring or artistic sufficient to make arms that seem like Ostermeyer’s. No laptop can appropriately simulate an precise life written via scars, knots, and wrinkles. Certainly, no laptop can grasp the imaginative properties of hard-won existence. AI could also be getting higher at depicting arms, nevertheless it can not perceive what it means to be human.
Now take a look at your arms. What do they are saying?
Footnotes
[1] John Karras, “Theresia Ostermeyer, Woodbury County, 1936,” Des Moines Sunday Register (November 20, 1977): 14.
[2] Elizabeth McCausland, “Documentary Pictures,” Photograph Notes (January 1939): n.p.
[3] Quoted in Alex Hughes, “Why AI-generated Fingers are the Stuff of Nightmares, Defined by a Scientist,” BBC Science Focus (February 4, 2023). https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/why-ai-generated-hands-are-the-stuff-of-nightmares-explained-by-a-scientist (Accessed November 21, 2024).
