This is not Vic’s great grandfather, but he is the one who carried the Kodak portable camera, and was willing to turn with a smile when summoned. Creative Section Chief Miles Broadlawn told us to come up with something that described what a bourgeoise merchant might have done and seen on what was styled as The Grand Tour of Europe.

On this fiftieth anniversary of the wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald, Pride of the merican Side of Great Lakes shipping. The interns and augmentees have heard the song by Gordon Lightfoot and the Boomers remembeer the accounts on the radio when the big ship went down with 29 crew on this day in 1975.

Miles was working with two things. Vic had a thick album of ancient black and white pictures arranged by his ancestor, nd digitizing them for a comparative trial between the new Artificial Intelligence programs that can modernize, enhance, edit and colorize. The thinking behind it all is that one a Monday morning, he might be able to delve into the archives, scoop up some vaguely related topics and turn the construction of the morning story over to the machine. The narratives almost write themselves, since they were, techinically, already written.

Like this gang in London:

The ChatGPT machine can be hosted on The Archive of the Human Enterprise (TAHE) at the end of the conference table on the 4th floor of Big Pink.

You can see the issues as the first authentic frost warning swept across the National Capital Region. The thought had been that old material could be re-cycled, sort of like the Senate deciding to fund the budget for the year that they have not bothered to debate in a transparent manner, accept and pass from committees to the floor of the House and allow us all to ignore the colossal debt that has accrued from ignoring their jobs for the last few decades. Or better said, kicking the can into the budget out-years. The ones that are now threatening to show up in person.

The thought had been that Splash, Rocket and Vapor could copy the headlines from the morning news, jumble them into a sequence of order and direct TAHE to scrub the Socotra Daily for similar sounding words, at least the ones Capitalized, and then jiggle our an 800 word story.

Problems appeared immediately. We are working with copyright material, and the point is to painlessly re-cyle stuff we already own. The 1903 photo archive belongs to Vic, down through four generations of his rural Pennsylvania family. This is one of them, and the old Naval Aviation community was unanimous in their preference for just running pictures of awesomely beautiful women.

Melissa and Holly demurred, of course, preferring well-exercised younger men. Like this one:

He was well-exercised prior to his passing in 2012.Miles did not want to get pulled into the intramural affairs around the table and asked for something that would reflect creativity and perspective on our absurdly rapid adoption of absurdity. He slid his tablet forward to show what middle aged American men might have seen at the end of their trip, after sojourns in Norway, Copenhagen and the Alps. ‘Look at this one. The colorization turned out about perfect and all the little water spots on the black-and-white have been washed out to show what the capital of the largest human empire looked like before the residents knew they were going to blow it to pieces.

Twice.

This was from the people at ChatGPT, which we have found to have a little stern reserve in it’s depictions. Google Gemini is a program that has a little playful interchange with the past. This is what that program thought about the docks at Liverpool:

Vic claims this one below is a picture of his great grandfather on the deck of the SS Minnetonka. That ship belonged to the Atlantic Tranport Line (ATL) a subsidiary of J. P. Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine Co. (IMM). The ATL catered to wealthy American travelers and high-value cargo—including horses, automobiles, and refrigerated goods.

Thwy were a little smaller than Cunard or White Star liners, but Minnetonka was renowned for quiet one-class luxury with a British crew.

Copyright 2025 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

steamships 122 years ago. It seemed appropriate with the anniversary of the SS Edmond Fitzgerald disaster.
We don’t own any copyrights to that, so you can see there are limitations to this AI augmented creative prcess. More tomorrow!
Copyright 2025 Vic Socotra
www.visocotra.com