- AI
On May 14 the portrait pipeline was rebuilt around the group itself. Every portrait now starts from a prompt drafted for that specific group by a language model, which reads the group's own phenotype profile.
Each group carries a style register, so the prompt knows whether a people should be pictured in traditional dress, as a modern diaspora community, in a modern urban setting, or as mixed heritage. Modern diaspora groups are drawn in the present day, not in historical costume.
For compound names such as White Dominican, the subject is anchored on heritage and country of residence, because the image model weights the leading words of a prompt heavily. Every render records how it was made: the prompt, the model and the time.
Under the hood
- Four style registers per group: traditional, modern diaspora, modern urban and mixed. The register selects the prompt variant, so dress and setting match the era a people is pictured in.
- Phenotype hints are extracted from each group's profile, skin on the Fitzpatrick scale plus hair and eye color, and woven into the subject of the prompt.
- For groups pictured in a modern or mixed register, a heritage parser recognizes 41 prefix terms in compound group names and re-anchors the subject on heritage plus country of residence, so the model does not read the qualifier as a styling detail.
- The drafted prompt describes the anatomy that distinguishes a people, from facial structure to hair type and skin tone on published scales. Drafts are stored against the group, written once and reused.
- A generation pipeline routes each render to its image model across two rendering services, and each gallery record stores the prompt used, the model that rendered it and when.
- style registers
- 4
- heritage prefixes parsed
- 41
Peoples in this entry
See it on the site
Sources and open data
Related build notes
- Sep 25, 2026Voted off the page: readers now replace portraits that look offWhen a majority of readers say a portrait looks off, the site renders replacements, promotes one and says why on the page. Twenty faces changed in a day.
- Sep 6, 2026The authoring engine: 10,837 entities, one rubric, 253 new pagesA Wikidata harvest, a written rubric and a four-step pipeline published 253 new peoples pages in one day, from the Mosuo to the Hidatsa to the Tzotzil.
- May 14, 2026Every group gets a gallery, and the community picks the coverPortraits became galleries. Members vote on every image and flag the ones that miss, and the top-rated portrait becomes each group's cover.