ChatGPT and The Red Shoes

Every now and then I visit the “The Emeric Pressburger and Michael Pressburger” Facebook Group. The last time I did so, I was dismayed to find this colorized photograph of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell together with the composer Brian Easdale.

What particularly bothered me was the grotesque distortion of the colour of The Red Shoes ballet score, because it actually features in an important scene of the film itself – I saw red to see that the title of The Red Shoes was not red!

So ubiquitous has the use of AI become that I was curious to see what ChatGPT would make of it – I assumed that the colorization of the photo itself must have depended upon an AI system.

I showed the colorized image to ChatGPT and asked the following question: “Can you analyse this photograph for me in terms of its colour? I’m particularly keen to know what colour would you call the script that the man on the right is holding.”

Instantly it answered:

This is a remarkably controlled image in colour terms — almost like a still from a Powell and Pressburger film itself. The palette is deliberately restrained, built around muted institutional tones: cream, stone, tobacco brown, charcoal grey, faded blue and the warm parchment colour of the script. There’s very little saturation anywhere, which gives the whole image a slightly archival, mid-century atmosphere.

The strongest colour accent is unquestionably the script cover that the man on the right is holding. I would describe its colour as:

• buff

• or perhaps manila

• with touches of ochre and aged parchment

“Buff” is probably the most exact traditional term — the sort of colour associated with old production files, government folders and theatre scripts from the 1940s and 50s. It has that slightly dusty yellow-brown tone that comes from cheap paper ageing over time.

The typography on the cover appears to read:

THE RED SHOES

Ballet by

Boris Kochno

Music by

Brian Easdale

The lower line is harder to decipher, but it seems to refer to the choreography or production credit. The large title “THE RED SHOES” is very clear.

Colour-wise, what is interesting is how the buff script acts almost as a surrogate for the absent “red” of the title. In a film actually called The Red Shoes, one might expect a vivid crimson object to dominate the frame — but instead the image suppresses red almost entirely. That restraint makes the title itself resonate more strongly. The eye keeps expecting colour that never quite arrives.

There is also a very elegant tonal structure:

• the left figure is dominated by cool greys,

• the centre figure by warm browns,

• the right figure by blue-grey,

• and the script sits chromatically between all three, tying the composition together.

The lighting contributes greatly to this. The daylight from the right-hand windows is soft and northern in quality — creamy rather than white — which prevents the buff paper from turning yellow or garish. It keeps the whole image in the realm of subdued sophistication rather than nostalgia cliché.

It has the look of a carefully graded contemporary photograph trying to evoke three-strip Technicolor memory without actually reproducing Technicolor saturation.

This is ChatGPT bullSHT. Routinely dishonest, because it lacks the human intelligence to be otherwise – and always mimicking certainty rather than accept doubt – it does not care about spouting fair-seeming drivel.

It is like one of those tedious know-it-alls you occasionally meet at parties who know very little about anything that actually matters. It is deeply disturbing that it has been unleashed on the world and will presumably become only ever more frighteningly deceptive – and I suppose eventually coercive – in the years to come.

“ChatGPT can make mistakes,” says a tiny message beneath the search box. “Check important info.”

Ignore the small print at your peril.