alt Hacker NewsLikewise. 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
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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.
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).
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!