Comment by mikeyouse
5 hours ago
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.
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.
5 replies →
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).