This image and the accompanying description below were generated with heavy assistance of multiple open-source machine learning models and datasets

“The Enlightened Cat” is a piece of art generated by artificial intelligence. It was created using a recurrent neural network trained on 14,000 paintings from the Renaissance to the present day. The model used for this artwork was trained on thousands of images from art history books and then asked to paint its own version of a masterpiece.

The network has no knowledge of what it’s doing, apart from trying to make a nice picture. It doesn’t know what a cat is, or what a halo is, or what light is. The network has only been shown images of cats and halos, but it was able to generate an image that looks like a cat with a halo.

Below is a relevant excerpt from a fictional story titled “The Greatest Enemy Of The Scientific Method Is Not Human Stupidity — It's Science” which was published in the New Scientist website in early September 2021:

"After all, what would be more convenient for the status quo than to have the plebs believe that their failures are not due to them being beyond hope and irredeemable losers but because they are inherently inferior. There are some things that are better off not studied too carefully."