Read time: 5 min.

Thirty men and women have served as mayor of Muncie, Indiana, since 1865, and nearly all of them sat for clear portraits or photographs. That is, all except one: William F. Jones. A Republican who served as Muncie’s fourth and sixth mayor during the 1870s and 1880s, the only known image of him is frustratingly indiscernible. Hoping to shed some light on the mystery of what he looked like, I turned to ChatGPT for help.

William F. Jones was born on March 30, 1813, in Dutchess County, New York. A railroad official by trade, he spent a decade in Ohio before moving to Hartford City. Jones came south to settle in Muncie around 1852¹ and eventually became one of the city’s most active public servants. He was elected mayor twice, became a state representative and city councilman, and even spent time on the Muncie School Board. With a résumé like that, you’d expect a respectable portrait or photograph to have survived! Strangely, it hasn’t.

That’s not to say people haven’t tried to fill in the blanks. Perhaps the first was Bob Cunningham, Muncie’s twenty-third mayor.  Cunningham was something of an artist and drew cartoons after he left office. In 1986, he turned his attention to a new project: a comprehensive history of Muncie city elections from 1905 to the present². Unfortunately, I’m not sure he nailed Jones’ likeness.

I probably couldn’t do any better myself, though, so that’s when I brought ChatGPT in. If you’re not familiar, it’s a chatbot that understands and responds to questions or prompts in a conversational way. Known as a Large Language Model, ChatGPT has been trained on massive amounts of data to be able to predict what word or sentence comes next in its response. It does the same for image generation: a user uploads an image, provides a prompt, and lets the chatbot get to work refining it. Limitless image generation requires a subscription to the service, so I ponied up twenty bucks.

I uploaded the image of William F. Jones I pulled from Wikipedia and told ChatGPT to “improve the clarity of this 1870s portrait while retaining its original character.” The first image that came back did just that. Although the output was still low quality, I think it captured Jones’ chin, hair, and overall expression pretty well, at least from what can be discerned from the original image. He looks morose, but squint and you’ll find that he did in the Wikipedia portrait as well.

Despite Jones’ grim visage, I wasn’t quite done. I learned that enhancing an enhancement is sometimes like playing a grade-school game of “Telephone,” but that’s exactly what I asked the bot to do with the output it provided. I opened a new instance and directed it to “enhance this image to photorealism.” Here’s what it created. Jones’ portrait wouldn’t be mistaken for an actual photo, but the result seems like a reasonable interpretation of ChatGPT’s previous picture.

I came back to ChatGPT to upload the 1986 sketch of William F. Jones with the same initial prompt just for fun. I think the result is close to what Bob Cunningham might have been trying for! I still don’t think it’s that close of a likeness, but at least the bot nailed the artistic element. It’d be interesting to render each of Muncie’s mayors in that style for consistency.

I could have pushed further for a genuine likeness of William F. Jones with better prompting, but the truth is that his real face is mostly lost to history. Jones died in 1890 at seventy-six or seventy-seven, with perhaps only one other photograph ever taken. The images I generated with ChatGPT were intriguing, even fun, but they only underscored the point: nothing can replace the weight and authenticity of an original portrait! If only we had one.

Sources Cited
1 Walker, D. (2015, March 20). Muncie mayors: Profiles of every one, from Brady to Tyler. The Muncie Star Press. Web. Retrieved June 26, 2025. 
2 Spurgeon, B. (1986, July 27). Cunningham’s New Book a Substantial Compilation of Muncie Election History. The Muncie Star. p. 21.