A century ago, Cubism caused the same kind of stir in the art world as large language models recently caused in the world of computing. There are parallels between the way it transformed painting and the way LLMs are transforming computer semantics.

The Cubist Revolution

Man in a Hammock by Albert Gleizes
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Cubist pictures provoke a mixed reaction even today. In the beginning, from around 1908, they were highly controversial. Many art lovers and critics were hostile. At one point, the French parliament discussed whether funding for exhibitions that included Cubist works was an appropriate use of government money. The name Cubism was originally used by a critic as a term of abuse. It was embraced by the painters, and the movement was promoted through major exhibitions in Paris and New York. Cubism's initial impetus lasted until the start of war in 1914. It strongly influenced later 20th century art movements, and is still important.

Since the renaissance, artists had painted scenes in perspective to give their pictures realism. Cubist painters abandoned this approach in order to express more meaning. In "Du Cubism", the first published explanation of Cubism by its practitioners, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote that "an object has not one absolute form, it has several; it has as many as there are planes in the domain of meaning." In the picture to the left, Gleizes shows the face of the subject (thought to be his co-author Metzinger) both from the front and in profile. He shows several other objects from multiple perspectives, and he gives context to the scene by including leaves, a garden chair, and buildings, suggesting a city or suburban garden. (You can click the picture to see a higher-resolution version.) He shows multiple forms, that in real life you would not see simultaneously, to give meaning that would be lost in a single-perspective view. 

(Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso are credited as the inventors of Cubism. Gleizes and Metzinger were members of the small group who joined the movement in its early stages, and who contributed pictures to the exhibitions that made Cubism famous.)

Computer Semantics

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. In the context of computing, it relates to meaning shared by computers and people. Wikipedia describes a semantic layer as "a business representation of corporate data that helps end users access data autonomously using common business terms". The semantic web has been described by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other as "an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation". People should describe things so that computers can follow their instructions as intended, and computers should present their results so that people can understand them properly. This is not easy to achieve.