As long as they're not GenAI altered photos, I'm cool with these things.
I'm a pretty avid member of various history groups, and one thing that has absolutely driven me nuts for the past couple of years is how many people there are that use AI for upscaling and colorization of photos - not knowing or noticing how the models fundamentally alter the photos. A couple of zooms in on the photo, and it is nightmare fuel.
A week ago me and some members spent a couple of hours trying to find a building from the early 1900s, because someone had uploaded a photo and asked about the building. Sifted through old maps, newspapers, etc. but couldn't find anything. Turns out said photo had been upscaled via AI, which in turn had added some buildings here and there.
But, yeah, for stuff like OP posted it could work out nicely.
Likewise. There’s this older woman who is trying to add some historical color to our local beach town FB group by using some terrible AI tool to colorize pictures from the early 1900s. She doesn’t accept any feedback that it’s problematic to share what are essentially fake pics in that way.. they often just randomly remove people, or add new ones. Buildings are changed, cars are remodeled, it’s crazy how different the before/after are. The comments are usually split as well, but I absolutely loathe how AI is used there. She means well, but the tools are so bad for this and so poorly explained.
I was looking for photos of NYC in the 1990s a few weeks ago. I eventually found some, but my search was greatly obstructed by AI photos of NYC in the 1990s.
The experiance made me certain that AI is going to to much more harm than good to the buisness of archiving historical photos.
As for the lady who is distorting photos to colorize them - I don't even understand why you would want to do that. There are other ways!
yeah, you're right. That's why she's doing it. But its a weird idea: I like this historical photo, so I'm going to distort in order to add color, which makes it not a historical photo anymore. I guess to her the distortion is so minimal it loses nothing, but to me it loses everything.
Its like saying "I love Da Vinci's art so I'm going to draw a moustache on everyone in the last supper" which you probably wouldn't do if you really loved Da Vinci's art.
There are some pretty obvious distortions when you closely look at the difference between the historical and AI-corrupted images. But I have to admit, the colorized one has a nice vibe to it, if you don't look too closely it gives a really nice feel for what the moment was actually like, more than the accurate black-and-white.
Which is to say, I think it comes down to what you value most out of historical photos; a forensic record of truth, or general idea of what it was like to live at the time, compared to today.
The photo is oversaturated and psychedelic. It seriously looks like what the world looks like on a dose of drugs. I much prefer the black and white one. They're both unreal in their "same same, but different" ways
I'm firmly against uncontrolled AI use. But as long as the edits are strongly labeled, I have to say I enjoy the effect.
Maybe it's because I'm too young and I've never had B&W content around, but the edited picture allows me to feel the photograph as real, as a place I could have walked around, which I can't really do with the original. I find that effect more valuable than a specific roof being deformed or whatever.
In the same way, so many current cameras (mostly phones) that do automatic post-processing of images, up to and including AI, is going to lessen their future archeological value.
Okay that before/after is fantastic. Really shows how normal the past is. No wonder she keeps doing it. It must be pretty good for her to be able to remember those moments. I love it!
Yep, these models are all trash. They happily invent wrong detail. If you never knew anyone in the photograph, then knock yourself out, let it invent faces that didn't exist. But if you're doing anything with family photographs just stop. Unless you can tune a model on your own family photographs you can't magically add "correct" detail to a blurred, pixelated, grainy or unfocused photo. You can add colour, pretty reliably though.
Do you have any recommendations for colorization tools? I agree that all of the popular image models subtly tweak faces, it is very uncanny when working with pictures of people I knew before they passed. In a pre-GPT age, there were some good but not great colorization tools, and as far as I can tell you can’t get better-than-2020 performance unless you’re willing to get your expression adjusted or your eyebrows redone.
It really says something about the current state of affairs that after reading the headline, my first thought was oh god no, the photos are probably all hallucinated...
But it's actually really cool how they used AI to better determine the locations of the photos. I love this!
AI had been a super useful for processing historical data. Interviewed a volunteer last month from the diary archive in Germany, and they're using supervised AI for diary transcription. Going from (old) personalized hand script to text is a lot of work, even for experienced transcribers. Being able to automate the first pass of that has been a huge boon to their processing pipeline.
Its funny that author posted a very cool use of AI to help filter/organize and OCR hard to read text about a large photoset and built a great way to visualize his ongoing project with a lot of innovation and cool output..
But the majority of the commnents (including the top comment) on this thread are about how bad AI Images are and how bad AI is in general, how it is altering history etc -when the author didn't even do any of that in his post
It shows the mindset of the community these days more so than the technology.
I have mixed feelings about this. It's absolutely phenomenal that such a treasure trove was unlocked thanks to AI, but presenting the AI results are "definitive" (even with an "edit" or "report" feature that's applied equally to human-located and AI-located results) isn't really a win. The old dataset might have been incomplete, but where locations were determined, they were a result of a (probably neural/autistic/ocd) human contributor that had some measure of true confidence in the results. AI contributions are great, but imho they should never be allowed to freely mix with and dilute human contributions: the resulting dataset is permanently polluted.
Ideally they'd always carry an "AI-generated" flag (in the db and in the frontend) until manually reviewed (or never) by a human. If anything, this is actually in AI proponent's favor as it would let you periodically regenerate or cross-validate (a subset of) the AI contributions some years down the line when newer and better models are released!
As someone with a massive collection of antique postmarked postcards (probably the largest in the world for a particular city), this is very helpful and encouraging for getting my collection online.
I love this! Thanks for sharing. My job involves reviewing old maps and documents, and I have a special place in my heart for easily accessible archives.
So much cool stuff is freely available at libraries but in practice no one visits them anymore.
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I'm a pretty avid member of various history groups, and one thing that has absolutely driven me nuts for the past couple of years is how many people there are that use AI for upscaling and colorization of photos - not knowing or noticing how the models fundamentally alter the photos. A couple of zooms in on the photo, and it is nightmare fuel.
A week ago me and some members spent a couple of hours trying to find a building from the early 1900s, because someone had uploaded a photo and asked about the building. Sifted through old maps, newspapers, etc. but couldn't find anything. Turns out said photo had been upscaled via AI, which in turn had added some buildings here and there.
But, yeah, for stuff like OP posted it could work out nicely.
One random example of a before/after: https://imgur.com/a/WIAYLHm
The experiance made me certain that AI is going to to much more harm than good to the buisness of archiving historical photos.
As for the lady who is distorting photos to colorize them - I don't even understand why you would want to do that. There are other ways!
Its like saying "I love Da Vinci's art so I'm going to draw a moustache on everyone in the last supper" which you probably wouldn't do if you really loved Da Vinci's art.
Which is to say, I think it comes down to what you value most out of historical photos; a forensic record of truth, or general idea of what it was like to live at the time, compared to today.
Maybe it's because I'm too young and I've never had B&W content around, but the edited picture allows me to feel the photograph as real, as a place I could have walked around, which I can't really do with the original. I find that effect more valuable than a specific roof being deformed or whatever.
> If you really loved Da Vinci's art.
Meh, so what if I only love Da Vinci's art to the degree that it's amusing to adulterate with mustaches?
(Provenance is so important. The infinitely-recopied local history photos were never a great source anyway).
But it's actually really cool how they used AI to better determine the locations of the photos. I love this!
But the majority of the commnents (including the top comment) on this thread are about how bad AI Images are and how bad AI is in general, how it is altering history etc -when the author didn't even do any of that in his post
It shows the mindset of the community these days more so than the technology.
https://www.oldnyc.org/#707133f-a this is supposed to be here https://www.oldnyc.org/#702487f-a
also, if folks are interested in these old depictions of NYC, check out https://1940s.nyc/ as well!
Ideally they'd always carry an "AI-generated" flag (in the db and in the frontend) until manually reviewed (or never) by a human. If anything, this is actually in AI proponent's favor as it would let you periodically regenerate or cross-validate (a subset of) the AI contributions some years down the line when newer and better models are released!
So much cool stuff is freely available at libraries but in practice no one visits them anymore.
I haven't seen an "AI edited" image that hasn't changed important details, and so the result is just yet more slop.