Discussion
AI helps add 10,000 more photos to OldNYC
crazygringo: 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!
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.
