While walking from one site to another I passed a series of temporary lawn signs profiling various participants in that historical event.
One showed Col. Richard Gridley, the provincial artillery commander. It was a portrait in John Singleton Copley’s style.
By then I’d been studying Gridley for over twenty years. I’d never come across a portrait. But since Gridley’s not one of the most famous or influential figures of his time, I thought it was possible that a portrait had only recently been identified or made available to the public.
I took a photo with my phone and walked on. Then I saw more of those signs, showing other men in the unmistakable style of generative artificial-intelligence (A.I.) imagery. Those pictures didn’t try to replicate photographs or period art—they were overly dramatic, flat digital images with the patina of light brown produced from the mixture of all the colors. You probably know the look.
“Wait a minute,” I thought. I went back to the Gridley sign. Only then did I notice that at the lower left corner of the picture was the tiny label “AI Generated Image.”
Clearly the folks publicizing that big reenactment had used one of the generative A.I. programs to pump out a bunch of pictures—some in its standard style, some made to look like period portraits. And those pictures did catch the eye. For an expensive event designed to attract people not already interested in Revolutionary history, that might be a valuable function.
The risk is, of course, that those images could fool people into believing they’re real. That’s unlikely for the pictures in the obviously A.I. style, but this picture programmed to look like a Copley fooled me for a couple minutes.
So far this image hasn’t escaped the confinement of one lawn sign in Gloucester in June 2025. I certainly hope my photo taken at an angle doesn’t loose it onto the world. But I can think of plenty of examples of false or falsely attributed portraits proliferating on the internet almost as quickly as false quotations do.
In the past month I had a couple more encounters with A.I. and historical material. I wrote about a message from an “AI agent” at Ko-fi, one of my monthly addenda for generous supporters. I watched an online presentation using images adapted from authentic period artifacts but run through an A.I. program that changed details—apparently without the presenter realizing it. Those experiences made me think it was time to share some thoughts about the use of generative A.I. in presenting history.
TOMORROW: Hallucination nation.