One thing that people have tried to train Dogs and AI to do is to identify tanks so that they can be attacked and destroyed. In 2 cases I'm aware of it has gone wrong and in nearly the same way.
In WW2 the Russians trained dogs to find tanks and hide under them, little did the dogs know that they were carrying bombs with timers on them. The dogs were well trained and back at base they worked flawlessly, unfortunately, the dogs hadn't learnt to ID tanks in general but Russian tanks specifically because that's what they had been trained on.
When they were let loose on the battlefield the dogs sought out the nearest Russian tank, not the nearby German tanks and hide under them. It was already going to be a bad day for the dogs but it was now also a bad day for the Russian tank crew.
In the 70s and 80s, the US trained computer AIs to identify tanks hidden in satellite & aerial pictures, and the AI's got very good at it. However, as the easiest way to get pictures is to take photographs of your own side's tanks so they only really learnt to ID hidden US tanks.
While training a soldier to recognise tanks, in general, could be done, with these pictures, training AI could not because it is very difficult for them to go from a specific case to a general one.
While a human can cope with the idea of a tank as a concept, to a dog or AI it is just a collection of angles and shapes, and each design philosophy tends to have its subset of angles and shapes.
When it comes to people's opinions of architecture similar things happen, each person picks out what they use to identify good and bad architecture. To an aesthete or architect, the lines of a Georgian building are unmistakable, the regular patterns, the window size and the minimal decoration. Producing a pastiche of such thing should be and is easy, Bath is covered in them and the vast majority are disliked.
The reason they are disliked seems to be nothing to do with the architecture because that is virtually the same, the haters must be picking up on something else. Frequently these modern buildings are described as soulless, which is a description levelled at all modern buildings.
However, it doesn't seem that this soul resides in the architecture it resides somewhere else. The algorithm that is being used by some to identify bad architecture is not using the architecture in its deliberation but something else.
Recently I had a nose around Bath and talked to a couple of locals some of the schemes slagged off looked like very good pastiches but I think there were a couple of clues. In modern buildings, the quality of the stone is very good, it might not be genuine stone as it might have been processed to make it more uniform, the older buildings virtually all have flaws in the stone.
A lot of these flaws look like they would have been visible when it was first used whilst others are a product of weathering, exacerbating previously unseen flaws. In the image below the lower parts of the building seems to be far older than the upper parts. Whether this is true I can't say, the building looks to have had a significant rebuild and the contrast is clear.
I don't believe a lot of the people who object to new buildings of any style modernist or not are objecting to the architecture instead they are subconsciously picking up the cues about age and basing their critique on that. This means that no building will ever live up to their standards because they simply aren't compatible with new buildings.
We see a greater acceptance now of brutalist architecture, sure there are still lots of people who slag it off and call any building they don't like Brutalist, but more and more buildings are being seen for themselves rather than their date of birth. I think this is down to weathering and not to a change in taste.
This begs the question is it worth building anything to blend in and I think the answer is very rarely. These Georgian buildings were radical in their day and if we want to keep to their spirit modern building should also be radical and with equal ambition for longevity.
The building below is new, a fine pastiche and hated.
