you have the left-wingers who defend them as cruelly misunderstood victims of Spanish colonialism. That latter impulse is what results in videos like this one, an AI-enabled imagining of Tenochtitlan in 2026 if the Mexica had fended off their conquerors: [...] What’s remarkable about this video is that it’s more of an act of colonialism than anything the Spanish ever did. The Tenochtitlan it imagines is just Brooklyn but with step pyramids. Everything distinctive and disturbing has been airbrushed away, a kind of cultural erasure more profound than any book-burning, and no less destructive because it was born out of a patronizing condescension rather than out of indignation. It imagines the Mexica, as the victors, adopting our worldview and norms whole-cloth. This is because it cannot imagine anything outside of itself.
The obvious proposal is to design a realistic AI video based on actual Aztec beliefs and behaviors, only extrapolated to use modern technology. (YouTube would probably censor it.)
From the article about Aztecs:
The obvious proposal is to design a realistic AI video based on actual Aztec beliefs and behaviors, only extrapolated to use modern technology. (YouTube would probably censor it.)