A friend this morning pointed me to an interesting article critical of the current trend of using AI to colorize and restore old photos.
I don’t have a strong opinion on the matter, I like old photos, they are like time travel, I have spent quite some time browsing collections of old photos, and I find old restored photos or videos absolutely fascinating.
But I am very mindful of the fact that when we use AI to treat images, we are actually putting into images information that wasn’t there to begin with. And this doesn’t only apply to old photos: every image we capture with a modern phone is heavily processed by AI.
What we are storing in our phones and sharing on social media is a mix of reality and what a computer thinks reality should look like.
This made me think of a Marques Brownlee’s video I watched recently about DALL·E 2, a project by OpenAI that generates images from a text description.
For example, this is what he got asking for “a blue apple in a bowl of oranges”:
You can see more examples on MKBHD Twitter post.
What is striking is how photo-realistic this computer generated image is.
Forget about AI fixing existing photos, soon we won’t need to take photos, we will just tell a computer to generate one for us.
At that point reality will stop making sense. I will be able to ask for a photo of me, the pope and Fidel Castro riding a pony, and will get a perfectly credible image.
I think that this will change our relationship with photography.