New Controversial Irish Stamps

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I just purchased a sheet of the new, highly controversial Irish Daniel O'Connell stamps. The design features many hallmarks of being AI generated, such as weird hand shapes, horrible colours, an Irish harp morphing into an illogical shape, but most notably, the presence of a television antenna makes the fact these stamps are AI generated very blatant. Despite this, An Post has said "No AI used in stamp design". They are very ugly stamps.

Both stamps show a flag with three vertical fields. The colours tend towards the Irish flag that did not exist before 1848.

It appears the same prompt was used for both "designs", as they both feature an almost identical "person hanging onto tree".

The TV antenna is killer.

Couldn't the object from which the person is hanging be a lamppost rather than a tree. Looks more like a lampost to me. And lampposts do predate TV antennas, so it would fit with the existing motif. Just sayin'.

I have no idea what point you are trying to make. I never said lamp posts did not exist at the time, but I have never seen a lamp post with branches myself.

This article in the Irish Independent explains some of the controversy.

https://www.independent.ie/irish-ne...1392520.html

AI was not used in the making of a stamp depicting the revolutionary figure Daniel O'Connell, An Post has said.

Two new stamps were unveiled this week to mark the 250th anniversary of O'Connell's birth, as part of wider celebrations of The Liberator planned for this year.

One of the stamps features a depiction of O'Connell moving through Dublin city following his release from prison in 1844, with an old television aerial shown on a building in the background.

Television did not emerge in Ireland until 1949, 105 years after the scene depicted on the stamp, designed by Irish artist David Rooney.

O'Connell's campaigns in the 19th century led to the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, granting Catholics the right to serve as members of parliament and hold public office.

An Post has said AI software was not used to generate the image and the inclusion of a TV aerial on the stamp was an artistic "anachronism", used to create a visual link to O'Connell's modern communication methods.

It was included in the artwork as a "visual signal to link to the very modern, global range and impact of O'Connell", An Post said in a post on social media.

"We have worked with David before on some really excellent stamps like our Ice Men (Arctic Explorers series), the 50th anniversary of Sydney Opera House and celebrating the RNLI for example," a spokesperson for An Post said.

"The important thing here is to remember that these are an artistic representation not a faithful recreation of the events etc.

"The conversations around this will serve O'Connell and the celebrations of his 250th well I think. Hopefully, it will prompt some thought around O'Connell not just being a man of his times but a man for our times too."

The second stamp depicts O'Connell at one of his famous "monster meetings", massive public gatherings held in Ireland throughout the 1840s in an effort to have the Act of Union repealed.

Monster meetings were so-named for the size of the crowds that attended them and were seen as a key part of O'Connell's efforts to restore an Irish parliament.

Both stamps were unveiled by Taoiseach Micheál Martin and An Post CEO David McRedmond this week.

"By every measure, Daniel O'Connell was the most internationally known and influential leader in our history. In the words of Gladstone, he was the greatest popular leader the world has ever known," Mr Martin said.

That TV aerial is the funniest thing I've ever seen on a stamp.

It's a tree in the first stamp but a lamp-post in the second.

Why is the "l" in "Daniel" so much thicker than the "l"s in "O'Connell"? I await an unconvincing explanation from An Post.

Thanks for sharing these monstrosities, Ellie!

A lot of people commenting her are being much too literal and lack imagination. It's as if they do not realize that it's possible to combine the past with the present in artistic images. But of course it is possible. What if the world outside Daniel O'Connell in the images is the present-day world he helped to create? Wouldn't that mean that his actions -- in the middle of the picture -- now exist in the modern world which is the outer part of the image, the old historical events of his era, the 1840s, helping to create the current Irish world? How do you depict that? I'd say just like this with the historical event shown taking place in the same place that modern buildings (and TV antennas) exist today. Now, if you have to have every artistic image look exactly as you imagine it should look with no surprises in it, then this won't make sense to you. But presumably, the human mind can understand this.

There are many photos which combine older images -- dead soldiers in a street, for example -- with the modern view of that same location around them. This puts their sacrifices into our own world very dramatically. Right here on this corner you can stand on today a soldier died for you. On the beach where you're bathing today many men were killed invading Europe in 1944. It's not good to expect every single image you look at to be literally what it looks at in only one era. Ever seen a picture of Jesus in the modern world? Same idea, and I bet you don't argue that no one dressed that way 2,000 years ago.

It's perfectly possible the boy climbed a tree for one of O'Connell's speeches and later climbed a light post. They're clearly two completely different places if you bother to look at them. I don't get the sleigh, though, with the strange bearded figure in the second one. Maybe someone knows about that?

I see no tricolor flag in either stamp, just the Irish harp stamp so I think someone is making that claim up.

As for everything else, so what if you don't like the way this artist draws hands or you're confused by a tree one time and a lightpost another time? Some of this nit-picky "I gotcha" silliness is a bit embarrassing, to be honest.

And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar or, in this case, a shoddy design by a thoughtless designer, with some far-fetched, after the fact, explanation for the shoddiness.

Maybe in your world. TV antenna in a modern city full of young people? A stamp designed for geriatric stamp collectors who never had cable or sattelite TV. If you want to connect to the present day, going back to the 1970s is not the way to go.

Whenever a design requires this many words to defend/explain you know you have a problem. In marketing it is called "putting shine on a turd".

Who's Zinc?

Zinc Design Consultants of Dublin. They designed more Irish stamps.

Thanks. My guess, having looked at David Rooney's portfolio, is that Zinc has modified his artwork using an AI program. It does look like an AI-generated mashup to me. Maybe he'll write a song about this farrago.

(added)

Zinc are a "multi-disciplined, boutique agency" with a website that don't work.