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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

#31

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#32

Post by fleroviumna »

AIorNot wrote: post #27

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…

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Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#33

Post by thadt »

superxpro12 wrote: post #19
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?

They're doing transcription, not translation - so, turning someones pages of scrawled script into typewritten text. They have around 20 people nationwide that are able to do this. Most of them are older volunteers who aren't all that interested in computer assistance, but about a third of them have started leveraging the newer AI tools and it has accelerated their throughput significantly.

Having a 'best guess' at the lettering is really handy - in some cases the writing is really rather difficult to make out at all. Even being able to run something as simple as frequency analysis on stroke patterns would be a massive benefit.

At this point they're becoming throughput bound on the scanning process. Diaries are digitized since the archive is in one place and their transcription experts are spread out over the country.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#34

Post by pc86 »

jmyeet wrote: post #25
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 it…

Lots of 4,000 year old complaints about copper, I would imagine.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#35

Post by lapetitejort »

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!

Some other historical street view websites:

https://yesterdays.maprva.org/#11.5/37.5438/-77.4392 (specific to Richmond, Virginia, however deployments for other areas are in work)

https://pastvu.com/

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#36

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…

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

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#38

Post by merlin1de »

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…

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Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#39

Post by torben-friis »

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…

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.

Re: AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC

#40

Post by leviathant »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #18

If the images are "edited by AI" then they are not. They are prompted by the source image, but a new image is generated. I haven't seen an "AI edited" image that hasn't changed important details, and so the result is just yet more slop.

Please respond to what's linked, rather than make assumptions based on the headline.
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