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AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

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Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#21

Post by Morromist »

ok123456 wrote: post #13
Morromist wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#22

Post by ComputerGuru »

danvk wrote: post #20
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...

Thanks for the clarification!

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#23

Post by flir »

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…

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).

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#24

Post by rexpop »

Morromist wrote: post #21
ok123456 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meh, so what if I only love Da Vinci's art to the degree that it's amusing to adulterate with mustaches?

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#25

Post by jmyeet »

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.

I hadn't considered or read about this problem before but it makes sense.

It reminds me of the cuneiform problem. Between 500,000 and 1 million tablets have been collected. This is one of the earliest preserved writing systems. Even so, fewer than 10% of these tablets have been translated. I was surprised to learn this but it makes sense. There are several problems:

1. Scribes used a lot of shorthand;

2. Cuneiform itself changed over time;

3. Writers would use multiple languages (eg Sumerian, Akkadian), even on the same tablet. There are relatively few people fluent in these languages, particularly in multiple of them at once;

4. To some extent the tablets are 3D such that a 2D photo might not be sufficient to translate because you might need to physically turn the tablet to accurately see the marks; and

5. In some cases the tablets are incomplete or broken so you may not to figure out how things fit together.

I wonder if AI can help make inroads into this 90%. I really wonder what is waiting to be unearthed.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#26

Post by tux1968 »

Morromist wrote: post #21
ok123456 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#27

Post by AIorNot »

Its funny that author posted a very cool use of AI to help filter/organize and OCR hard to read text about a large photoset and built a great way to visualize his ongoing project with a lot of innovation and cool output..

But the majority of the commnents (including the top comment) on this thread are about how bad AI Images are and how bad AI is in general, how it is altering history etc -when the author didn't even do any of that in his post

It shows the mindset of the community these days more so than the technology.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#28

Post by Morromist »

rexpop wrote: post #24
Morromist wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Meh, so what if I only love Da Vinci's art to the degree that it's amusing to adulterate with mustaches?

Huh. I didn't consider that.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#29

Post by tux1968 »

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…

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.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#30

Post by z3c0 »

tux1968 wrote: post #29
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…

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.
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