Claudius is played by Derek Jacobi substantively as Robert Graves wrote him. in the 1930s. Graves wrote him as the hero. Of course he was whitewashed. So, what the BBC did is faithfully recreate the characterisation Graves wrote. And wrote, a long long time ago, before historicity was an issue. Graves wrote two books about claudius, he becomes a darker character in the last 10 pages of the second book. Graves also wrote count Belisarius about a different time in a roman story arc. He wrote for an age where many people in England spoke latin, a little, from school. He was writing for the wider audience who maybe didnt but also knew roman values existed in the english cultural landscape, because it was taught.

The danger here, is autodidacts, who take this tiktok as a source of ground truth in their ideation of how the past is. We can see the effect in Vikings-have-horns story. Thats an almost entirely modern construction. It literally has no historic context, horns on helms appear in times, for decorative purposes. We knew from archeology viking helms didn't do this but Hollywood does as hollywood must. Kirk Douglas looked sexy as a viking in a helm with horns and here we are.

Yes, "dangerous" is hyperbole. Everyone arguing a case uses hyperbole, rhetoric was a significant component of the cursus honarum for romans with status to enter the senate. your enemy was full of shit, literally, or more figuratively, because that was how you won. The danger is not the same as the danger of eating poisonous mushrooms, or walking in bare feet on broken glass. its rhetorical danger.

Gatekeeping exists. Objections to it, tend to look very like another rhetorical objection. IF you were permitted into the gatekeeping camp, you'd do it to, and in fact, what you are doing can be said to be a function of using the gate to hold it open to every theory allowed, rather than using the gate to shut off noise. you're therefore gatekeeping too, in a different sense. keeping it open, to suit your own purposes.

What I'm saying is that the BBC intentionally subverts their historical series to intentionally inject biases that are ahistorical but fit either commercial or political tastes. These TikTok videos were made in good faith but made a series of largely inconsequential mistakes inadvertently, and in a ___domain where few expect the sort of accuracy most would expect from something appearing on the BBC.

The latter is far less relevant than the former, yet it's the former pretending to freak out about the 'dangers' posed by the latter. And no I don't gatekeep on anything, ever. It's childish, insecure, and myopic. The more people that get involved in any thing the better that thing will be, in the longrun.

Fair enough. I suppose we won't agree on the relative harms. I tend to focus on bad AI outcomes as indicative of the badness in AI as applied in general. it is actually awesome how the videos are coming out, they are both good, and bad depending on which things you notice. The artifacts of a-historicity are less bad for you, and I think for historians are the niggles which suggest distrust in the product because they project glass windows or pizza into a time they didn't apply to

Awesome to video, and constructed reality. Not so awesome to fine detail. It will be similar for "what would it be like to be inside a nuclear reactor" because it is very unlikely to model the real cherenkov radiation effects, or the decay of the video CCD and your eyeballs, unless suitably prompted and even then, its so subjective, the most likely outcome is the video tropes in millions (hyperbole) that can be scavanged for imagery. Or surgery, which will model what TV doctors do which tries to be faithful, but can only approximate. All the AI models of the world will be nit-picked to death, and subsequently improve.

The critique is of course input.

Of course I agree on all of this. Another typical one people don't realize is when they look at pictures of the cosmos and awe at the wonderful colors, except those colors don't actually exist. If we had a spaceship that could bring us within range to see the Pillars of Creation with the naked eye, they'd probably look mostly blandish gray and perhaps we might pick up a hint of red, and that's that. The colors in most cases are post-processing photoshop efforts done by artists to colorize astronomical data that falls outside the visible spectrum - infrared in particular. Even in cases where it's done in the visible range, it's a high magnification long exposure which again means it'd look nothing like what you'd "really" see.

And yeah, the nitpicking can indeed lead to much better outputs in the future. And also give historians a chance to flex their knowledge of esoterica. And unlike some high production value historical series, it can all be redone with this new input in no time. Of course with new mistakes to then correct, probably endlessly, but there's an asymptote towards perfection we can progress along. When the authors start intentionally breaking things to inject their own politics or biases though, and then presenting that as 'authentic', I'd be the first to be here bitching about it. Well unless the author had some reasonable, if fringe, argument for that being what things were "really" like - history is, in many cases, a recreation based on best guesses, and those guesses end up wrong with a reasonable degree of frequency.