The "racial stuff" seems relevant here. Sure, some people try and insert race into everything, but in this case it's a relevant, and interesting aspect of the problem domain.
My understanding is that the racial identity of the ancient Romans are actually a lot more ambiguous then most people realize, and the way the author attempts to reconcile that ambiguity has a huge impact on the image output here. And it's an interesting problem, Yann LeCun has discussed a bit about how to account for racial diversity via ML techniques (it's not just about the training data set!).
From what I recall, the reason for this racial ambiguity is because ancient Rome (and the entire Mediterranean region) was a cosmopolitan hotbed where many different ethnicities were mixing together all the time. On top of that, they didn't have the same kind of racial constructs we had, and so it's actually unclear what the races of various ancient Romans actually were.
The way I like to explain it to people is that culture, ancestry, and language are 3 separate (but related) things. Knowing one doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the other two. In this case, it would tell you that the genetics are not sufficient to describe the categories of Roman ethnicity without additional justification that in this one particular case, they are.
My understanding is that the racial identity of the ancient Romans are actually a lot more ambiguous then most people realize, and the way the author attempts to reconcile that ambiguity has a huge impact on the image output here. And it's an interesting problem, Yann LeCun has discussed a bit about how to account for racial diversity via ML techniques (it's not just about the training data set!).
From what I recall, the reason for this racial ambiguity is because ancient Rome (and the entire Mediterranean region) was a cosmopolitan hotbed where many different ethnicities were mixing together all the time. On top of that, they didn't have the same kind of racial constructs we had, and so it's actually unclear what the races of various ancient Romans actually were.