[TrackerFF]

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.

[mikeyouse]

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

[Morromist]

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!

[ok123456]

Maybe she just thinks it's cool? It's hardly the worst use of AI on Facebook.

[Morromist]

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.

[tux1968]

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.

[butlike]

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

[SoftTalker]

No no, those are color photographs. The world was black and white back then.

[torben-friis]

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.

[mikeyouse]

The effect bugs me personally mainly because the cars are implausible colors, there are a ton of small changes to e.g. the windows on the campers etc. But even more annoyingly, most of her posts are just the color photos without even the source pic. She clearly enjoys it, and many people in the comments do too, but I just have this existential dread that those will be slurped up in the next AI push and treated as historical truth in the future.

[rexpop]

> 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?

[butlike]

Then you pass both the original and the mustache'd photo across the table while boisterously announce: "look how absurd it is to love something so wholly and completely!" to the room instead of the person the photographs were passed to!

[Morromist]

Huh. I didn't consider that.

[tux1968]

It would be nice if every upsampled image (done with AI or otherwise) contained a copy of the source image in its metadata.

[flir]

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).

[tux1968]

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.

[z3c0]

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.

[userbinator]

Nor should they be admissible as evidence in court.

[renewiltord]

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!

[raffraffraff]

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.

[arctic-true]

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.

[red75prime]

> there were some good but not great colorization tools

I've seen the-grass-is-green-the-clothes-are-beige tools. Was there anything better than that?