Method & Ethics

Human taste, machine reach. We start from a real photograph. A person chooses every image that ships. The AI is a brush. The curation is the craft.

How an image is made

1. A real photograph of the Wilmington subject is captured or sourced with credit.
2. The image is fed to an AI model with a Nocturne style prompt and a structural reference so the landmark stays itself.
3. A person reviews every output. Artifacted, unrecognizable, or off-tone results are discarded, not shipped.
4. The keeper is paired with the original. Both are labeled clearly on the page.

The seven principles

These are not decoration. They are the rules every image and every page must pass before it ships.

1. Real base, every time.

   Each reinterpretation begins from a real photograph of the actual Wilmington subject. No invented landmarks. No generic city stand-ins.

2. Credit everything.

   Name the photographer, the location, the date, and any archive or artistic tradition referenced. Credits live on the page, not in a hidden file.

3. Human in the loop.

   A person reviews every output for artifacts and accuracy before publishing. We never ship an image we have not looked at closely.

4. Acknowledge the land and the people.

   We open with a Lenape land acknowledgment. We tell Black Wilmington's history plainly. We do not flatten or erase real people.

5. Consent for faces.

   No identifiable living person is reinterpreted without permission. The launch favors architecture, landscape, and stone over crowds.

6. Complement, never compete.

   We credit and invite Wilmington's living artists and institutions. We frame the work as one more voice, not a cheaper substitute for theirs.

7. Label the AI.

   We are transparent that these are AI reinterpretations. Clear labeling is the honest default, the way an ingredient list is.