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

  today at 6:37 PM

  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

    today at 6:45 PM

    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

      today at 6:53 PM

      Maybe she just thinks it's cool? It's hardly the worst use of AI on Facebook.

      • Morromist

        today at 8:02 PM

        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.

        • tux1968

          today at 8:37 PM

          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.

        • rexpop

          today at 8:27 PM

          > 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?

  • flir

    today at 8:24 PM

    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).

• arctic-true

  today at 7:06 PM

  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.

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.

• superxpro12

  today at 7:48 PM

  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?

• jmyeet

  today at 8:27 PM

  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.

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!

• danvk

  today at 7:56 PM

  (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...

  • ComputerGuru

    today at 8:24 PM

    Thanks for the clarification!

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!

• NoSalt

  today at 5:35 PM

  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!

• gdulli

  today at 6:07 PM

  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.

  • crote

    today at 6:37 PM

    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.

• danvk

  today at 7:06 PM

  (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...

Super cool project, nice work.

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

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.