The Duchamp birthday post of July 28 included a spontaneous and very brief image prompt: “Marcel Duchamp blowing out the candles on his birthday cake in a photo that somehow encapsulates the entire history of Dada and Surrealism.” Chat rose to the occasion with this inadequate prompt, and though it may have produced a man who does not much resemble Duchamp, presumably for copyright reasons, the cake is a thing of convulsive beauty. Which leads to the notion of Bingian Translational Reanalysis applied to the image prompt—now known as BTR-I. I as in image, of course. That’s not a 1 unless you’re Linda McMahon.

So let’s run the prompt via French, Finnish, Frisian, Friulian, Greek, Icelandic, and, of course, back to English. I start with French in honor of Duchamp, and then there’s nothing more to this than I’m in the F’s, and now I’ll scroll a bit further down the list. 

The resultant BTR-I prompt: “Marcel Duchamp took a picture of a candle on the day of birth, which somehow unites the entire history of Dadaism and Surrealism.” What will Chat do with this? Wonders!

First off, it’s not a photo like the previous image, it’s a painting. Or maybe a poster or a lithograph. There’s a chessboard in a clear nod to Duchamp, but that’s a wagon wheel, not a bicycle wheel. Gemini says he never used a wagon wheel. Perhaps the wagon wheel is some kind of wry commentary on the bicycle wheel. The pioneer spirit? And perhaps Dada is the left side, Surrealism the right, a clear bifurcation? I don’t want to ask Chat anything about how it made this particular image. I don’t want to make it, um, self-conscious. I ask Gemini if the rose has any significance in the history of Dada, and apparently it doesn’t. Could Chat be so subtle as to reference Rrose Sélavy here? Maybe. Or Samy Rosenstock? Who knows. The key is Chat sees it perhaps from Duchamp’s POV as he apparently looks upon, or perhaps paints, a still-life with an ambiguously overwrought collaged background. “Took a picture” is open to interpretation. This turns out to be ingenious, because Meta (left) and Grok (right) don’t see it that way, much to their chagrin, if they were capable of chagrin.

They take an extremely literal photographic approach in which the usual older man who bears no resemblance to Duchamp is actually photographing a candle with an oddly proportioned, seemingly old-school camera—though in neither image is he actually pointing the camera at the candle—amid a background that encapsulates little more than a room. Did Duchamp actually ever tack papers to a bulletin board? We can only pray, no.

Gemini Pro simply wouldn’t produce an image at all, begging off on “guidelines” in a typically pathetic Google display of cold feet. Claude, it should be noted, does not make images, period—not even in a premium account. I don’t have one, but I asked. On July 28 it gave me the impression it was refusing to make the birthday image, not that it simply didn’t do images, it’s beneath its elite-coder dignity.

Meta and Grok, meanwhile, are practically begging me to request some enhancements so they can crank out more disposable art, as if the first take doesn’t really count, it’s just something to build on. But in fact it’s everything: Ginsberg’s Buddhist-inspired “First thought, best thought” is a foundational principle of BTR-I. Chat, on the other hand, just produces the image and sits there, probably in a full lotus. Why is it so far ahead? Is it the $20 a month? Is it the Altman Effect? Was that a Robert Ludlum novel?

To bash Grok a bit more, it suggests (from left to right) a “Surrealist collage,” a “Cubist distortion” and a “Futurist distortion” of its original, all of which are remarkably, pointlessly terrible.

What’s with the cats? Was Duchamp known as a cat lover? Not as far as I know. Gemini agrees. There’s apparently a 1913 photo where he’s posing with his brothers, and the photo includes Jacques Villon’s dog, named Pipe. (Cue the Magritte jokes.) And that’s it. But Gemini is wrong. The photo in question is on the Duchamp Research Portal where the brothers are posing with the dog and two cats. I don’t bother pointing this out, because Gemini is already fed up: “In general, discussions about Duchamp’s life and work tend to focus on his intellectual pursuits, his relationships with other artists and patrons, and his revolutionary ideas about art, rather than his domestic life with animals.” Touché!