3.1. Zeuxis’ Helen and Butades’ Soldier: Where is the inspiration?
Would the Ancient Greeks have favored the easel over the digital? Is Ortiz correct in mobilizing the figure of the inspiring Muse as the sole privilege of the manual, self-expressing artist, relegating users of generative AI to mere commissioners or directors by default? Ancient discourses surrounding two myths relative to the visual arts may shed light on the ancient associations between artistic depiction and some of the most criticized features. In one of them, Zeuxis, painter par excellence in several myths of 5th-century Greece11 is faced with a conundrum: Replicating the beauty of Helen, the most beautiful being to ever have lived, yet dead long before his time. His process, which Cicero incites his disciples to apply to their own literary endeavors, consists in the creation of a “corpus” of five women, chosen in absentia based on the beauty of their male relatives, the physical features of which he later assembles into a perfect whole—a route to which his very name, a form of the verb zeugnumi (yoking, fastening together) is certainly not unrelated.
He selected five, whose names many poets recorded because they were approved by the judgement of him who must have been the supreme judge of beauty. He chose five because he did not think all the qualities which he sought to combine in a portrayal of beauty could be found in one person, because in no single case has Nature made anything perfect and finished in every part….12
The peculiar status of the young women, which Cicero insists are remembered in name for their contribution, but not for the specific features they lent to the sculptures, strikes an odd resemblance to the training data of generative models, collected and annotated, yet diffused and unrecognizable in the outputted results.
A further source of information lies in the tale of Butades of Sicyone, a sculptor credited as the first depicter of a human likeness—the lover of his unnamed daughter, a departing soldier whose shadow she traced in coal for her father to fill in with clay. Frontisi-Ducroux demonstrates that Pliny’s account of the tale credibly hinges on wordplay—the Latin word pupilla, just like the Greek kore, designating both a young woman or the pupil of one’s eye—to establish a dual model of artistic poiesis: The daughter stands for the artist’s senses and subjectivity, sensitive to beauty yet unskilled yet also subordinated to the technical craft of the rational mind that presents them.13 Frontisi-Ducroux evokes in closing the possibility of the myth aptly describing the relationship between a photographer and a camera:14 Extending the parallel to the complementary abilities of the AI artist and the machine does not seem like a wild stretch.
Neither of the quoted accounts center inspiration or emotional expression, instead underlying a starkly different set of skills: Zeuxis as the master combiner, assembling details from a corpus he indirectly selected, or Butades, skilled executor of the requests of the separate “apple of his eye.” Looking at this evidence, the dichotomous opposition between “classical” or “traditional” artistic methods and the novelty of AI, as a technological and data-sampling field, does not appear as self-evident.
3.2. Agency in Praxis: The Divinatory Flight of Words and Birds as Ancient Techne
One may object that both Zeuxis and Butades operate deliberate choices that a ML model would enact in their stead. To use Bender’s terminology, beyond the parroted nature of the content, the further crux of the issue would lie in the stochastic nature of the non-sentient machine that produces it indiscriminately, and the resulting alleged divestment of human agency. While the works of anthropologists of art, most notably Alfred Gell in Art and Agency
15 already do a great deal in recasting the artwork as an entanglement of social factors whose directionality isn’t necessarily always so obvious, we can find a further wrinkle in the institution of divination, especially in cases where it involves random processes through which human subjects apparently delegate their agency. Indeed, divination figures in good place in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, when the eponymous Titan of forethought and human savviness enumerates the different tekhnai (“crafts,” “know-hows”) he lent to primitive mankind to ensure its survival:
First among all beings, I learned to sift dreams for things that will necessarily happen the next day; I familiarized them with the chance utterances (kledônes), an art (tekhne) so tricky to interpret (duskritous), as well as with their own chance encounters (sumboloi) during their daily travels. The flight of the birds (ptesin oionon) with hooked talons I delineated with precision, between the one which by nature is auspicious and the one which is not to be named… In a brief sentence, learn the summary of all this: all the crafts (tekhnai) of mortals, it is from Prometheus that they get them.16
Just as central to human agency as medicine or metallurgy, then, are the kledônes and sumboloi—chance utterances and random meetings—as well as the witnessed flight of birds. The onset of these events is enough to trigger a shift in a decision-making process or ground a consensus, usually in favor of the individual with the wherewithal to verbally accept the omen as such.17 In Aristophanes’ comical play The Birds, from the same period, the humor primarily stems from the transfer of responsibility to a self-important and rebellious avian race. They argue that their essential role in the human society justifies their elevation to almost divine status. A key piece of evidence they present for their supreme nature is mankind’s tendency to consult the ptesin oionon before undertaking important projects. This practice has led to the colloquial use of the term “bird” (ornis) to refer to other kinds of divinatory signs that could similarly influence someone’s action:18
THE BIRDS: We are to you Ammon, Delphi, Dodona, Phoebus Apollo. For you first turn to birds before undertaking any course, whether that be trade, and towards acquisition of livelihood, and towards marriage of a man. And you label as “birds” (órnin te nomízete) all the things you employ to discern matters of divination (diakrínei manteías): to you, an ominous rumor (phḗmē) is a “bird” (órnin) ; you call a sneeze (ptarmón) a “bird,” a chance encounter (súmbolon) a “bird,” a sound (phōnḕn) a “bird,” [encountering] a servant (therápont᾽) a “bird,” a dream (ónon) a “bird.” Are we not clearly the prophetic (manteĩos) Apollo to you? If then you recognize us (nomísēte) as gods, we shall be your divining Muses, through us you will know the winds and the seasons, summer, winter, and the temperate months. We shall not withdraw ourselves to the highest clouds like Zeus, but shall be among you.19
The humor of this comedic passage lies at least partly in the Athenian audience’s perception of the tacit ambiguity at the heart of their practice of divination: while an essential piece of meaning- and decision-making, even closer to human senses than deities due to their tangible existence, divinatory vessels such as birds are ultimately only an extension of mankind’s agency, with the idea of their actual supremacy relegated to the satirical realm. One could even surmise that this scenario of the divinatory vessels exploiting this reliance of men to claim agency of their own, here played for laughs by Aristophanes, constitutes an early comparanda to the “rebellion of the machines” trope, common in both fictional depictions and current safety polemics surrounding artificial intelligence.
As we can see from the examples above, the institution of divination alone challenges deeply set dichotomies of the modern epistemological model: proactivity versus passivity, randomness versus deliberate course of action, arbitrary noise versus meaningful signal. Such evidence comforts us in abandoning the idea of a sudden “injunctive turn” tied to modernity (as Sadin claims), or the association of these themes solely with the mechanical or biological sciences (as does Mayor).