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Comment by Morromist | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

> 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.

Then you pass both the original and the mustache'd photo across the table while boisterously announce: "look how absurd it is to love something so wholly and completely!" to the room instead of the person the photographs were passed to!

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.

No no, those are color photographs. The world was black and white back then.

The photo is oversaturated and psychedelic. It seriously looks like what the world looks like on a dose of drugs. I much prefer the black and white one. They're both unreal in their "same same, but different" ways

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.

The effect bugs me personally mainly because the cars are implausible colors, there are a ton of small changes to e.g. the windows on the campers etc. But even more annoyingly, most of her posts are just the color photos without even the source pic. She clearly enjoys it, and many people in the comments do too, but I just have this existential dread that those will be slurped up in the next AI push and treated as historical truth in the future.

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