Comment by TrackerFF
4 hours ago
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.
One random example of a before/after: https://imgur.com/a/WIAYLHm
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!
Maybe she just thinks it's cool? It's hardly the worst use of AI on Facebook.
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It would be nice if every upsampled image (done with AI or otherwise) contained a copy of the source image in its metadata.
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.
I'm reminded of Samsung's "AI moon" debacle and how divided people were over it. At the end of the day, any photos with so many unknown variables wouldn't suffice for scientific purposes.
You could always one-up her by animating them.... maybe add Godzilla in the distance occasionally.
(Provenance is so important. The infinitely-recopied local history photos were never a great source anyway).
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.