Happy 100th, John Berger: DALL-E 2 spontaneously recreated his iconic 'seeing' gesture
Merzmensch · x · 2026-11-06
To mark art critic John Berger's 100th birthday, Merzmensch shares a curious find from 2022: when prompting DALL-E 2 for an "artist in disbelief," the model often had the figure perform Berger's iconic eye-touching gesture from Ways of Seeing, sometimes a pointing gesture instead.
Comparing the documentary screenshot with several DALL-E 2 outputs, the post shows the model implicitly reproducing a famous art-historical gesture — a vivid example of generative models absorbing cultural vocabulary without explicit instruction.
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