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AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

danvk.org

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Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#11

Post by Morromist »

mikeyouse wrote: post #9
TrackerFF wrote: post #5

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…

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 th…

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!

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#12

Post by thadt »

AI had been a super useful for processing historical data. Interviewed a volunteer last month from the diary archive in Germany, and they're using supervised AI for diary transcription. Going from (old) personalized hand script to text is a lot of work, even for experienced transcribers. Being able to automate the first pass of that has been a huge boon to their processing pipeline.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#13

Post by ok123456 »

Morromist wrote: post #11
mikeyouse wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#14

Post by arctic-true »

TrackerFF wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#15

Post by danvk »

brrrrrm wrote: post #6

I checked 3 spots I'm familiar with and 1 is wrong https://www.oldnyc.org/#707133f-a this is supposed to be here https://www.oldnyc.org/#702487f-a also, if folks are interested in these old depictions of NYC, check out https://1940s.nyc/ as well!

(Author here) IIUC you're saying that 707133f-a should be at 5th Ave & 9th Street, not 5th Ave & Union Street? Can you say more about why? The text on the back of the first image says "Union St. Station, 5th Ave," which is how it winds up at there. On the other hand, the NYPL page[1] titles the image "Union St. - 18th St."

(I briefly got excited that there might be a street sign _in_ the photo, but if you zoom way in it says "DENTIST")

+1 to 1940s.nyc. Very different photos — those are were taken for tax assessment, the ones on OldNYC were taken to document the city as it changed. The photographer had an arrangement where he'd get tips from demolition crews, and go shoot buildings before they were gone forever.

[1]: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5a5e06a0-c539-012f...

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#16

Post by ComputerGuru »

I have mixed feelings about this. It's absolutely phenomenal that such a treasure trove was unlocked thanks to AI, but presenting the AI results are "definitive" (even with an "edit" or "report" feature that's applied equally to human-located and AI-located results) isn't really a win. The old dataset might have been incomplete, but where locations were determined, they were a result of a (probably neural/autistic/ocd) human contributor that had some measure of true confidence in the results. AI contributions are great, but imho they should never be allowed to freely mix with and dilute human contributions: the resulting dataset is permanently polluted.

Ideally they'd always carry an "AI-generated" flag (in the db and in the frontend) until manually reviewed (or never) by a human. If anything, this is actually in AI proponent's favor as it would let you periodically regenerate or cross-validate (a subset of) the AI contributions some years down the line when newer and better models are released!

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#19

Post by superxpro12 »

thadt wrote: post #12

AI had been a super useful for processing historical data. Interviewed a volunteer last month from the diary archive in Germany, and they're using supervised AI for diary transcription. Going from (old) personalized hand script to text is a lot of work, even for experienced transcribers. Being able to automate the first pass of that has been a huge boon to their processing pipeline.

Can you go a bit deeper on this?

If the risk of mistranslation is high, I fail to comprehend how letting AI "take a swing at it" does not reduce the translation quality?

How are they ensure no drop in translation quality?

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#20

Post by danvk »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #16

I have mixed feelings about this. It's absolutely phenomenal that such a treasure trove was unlocked thanks to AI, but presenting the AI results are "definitive" (even with an "edit" or "report" feature that's applied equally to human-located and AI-located results) isn't really a win. The old dataset might have been incomplete, but where locations were determined, they were a result of a (probably neural/autistic/oc…

(author here) Just to be clear, none of the photos were ever human-located. The system this replaced was, roughly, regular expression + Google Maps geocoding API. The only photos located by hand were the ~200 I used for my test set: https://github.com/danvk/oldnyc/blob/master/data/geocode/out...
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