Why Generative AI Tools Are Better at Images and Speech Than Writing

There’s an obvious reason why generative AI tools are so good at creating visual art that would be very time-consuming to create yourself, yet the writing sounds robotic and awful. It has to do with the GenAI training data and the Baroque artist, Rembrandt.

Dr. Derek Austin 🥳
Coding at Dawn
Published in
10 min readAug 27, 2024

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DALL-E image created by prompting ChatGPT 4o “Make me an original Rembrandt masterpiece with tenebrism and chiaroscuro” so you can see the effect of training on 400+ years of the world’s painting masterpieces.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Dutch Golden Age painter, was born on July 15, 1606, in Leiden, Netherlands. Considered one of the best painters ever, he and his students in his Amsterdam-based studio were prolific and mastered the “Baroque style” of lighting and expression. His life’s work is estimated at over 300 paintings, 300 etchings, and 2,000 drawings.

But if a Dutch person met Rembrandt today, the contemporary time traveler wouldn’t be able to understand what Rembrandt was saying. While Rembrandt was fluid in Latin — basically nobody is today — people in the area of the Netherlands were speaking Old Dutch until 1550. At the same time, people were speaking Old English, Old High German. Then there’s what’s called Middle Dutch from 1150 to 1500, and Modern Dutch dates to 1550, roughly. The standardization of Dutch in and around 1637 even included aspects of the Dutch Low Saxon language, so…

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Dr. Derek Austin 🥳
Coding at Dawn

Hi, I'm Doctor Derek! I've been a professional web developer since 2005, and I love writing about programming with JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js & Git.