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.
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.
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!
An elephant in the room is that if you have too much data to process without AI, you have too many results to check for correctness when they come out of the AI.
This has been true since before LLMs, but now so many more people and use cases are enabled so much more easily. People are undisciplined and quick to take short term gains and handwave the correctness.
It is less of a problem if the output is explicitly marked as AI-generated and unverified, so people can treat it as a rough first draft. But mix AI output with well-vetted human-reviewed data, and you've basically made your entire data set worthless.
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.
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
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!
Same ... sort of. I thought it was going to extol the virtues of Vibe Coding. I am quite happy to be "disappointed".
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!
An elephant in the room is that if you have too much data to process without AI, you have too many results to check for correctness when they come out of the AI.
This has been true since before LLMs, but now so many more people and use cases are enabled so much more easily. People are undisciplined and quick to take short term gains and handwave the correctness.
It is less of a problem if the output is explicitly marked as AI-generated and unverified, so people can treat it as a rough first draft. But mix AI output with well-vetted human-reviewed data, and you've basically made your entire data set worthless.
This is pretty sweet. Funny seeing all the dots circling around New York and then abruptly stopping at Jersey City.
Very cool! I am surprised at the use of 4o, but I guess it was pretty good at OCR for its time