sketches Archives - The Reticulum

When I was a kid, we had this huge book of prints by Leonardo da Vinci. I loved it. Still do. So, just for fun, I used Stable Diffusion AI to get 30 images of 20th and 21st century political and business leaders as they might have been drawn by da Vinci. Check them out and see if you can identify your leaders. (And, by identify your leaders, I don’t mean to infer that these are all people that you personally would consider your leaders.)

I am pretty amazed at how well generative AI handles this task. And there’s the added bonus that we are using an artist who can’t make any copyright complaints. I fact, I wonder what da Vinci would say. I imagine he’d be both intrigued and appalled. Our of all the great artists of his age, I think da Vinci would fit best into the 21st century. I don’t know if he’d be a solitary iconoclast artist or the billionaire owner of a technology firm, but either way he’d be make his way.