1900 NYC colorized by latest and unreleased DeOldify model(twitter.com)
twitter.com
1900 NYC colorized by latest and unreleased DeOldify model
https://twitter.com/citnaj/status/1219156481762713602
5 comments
Color palette leans too much towards purple, and the whites are far too bright -- those people would be lucky to own two outfits, and keeping the shirts that white on a daily basis without laundry facilities would have been impossible. Not to mention the smoke and soot from coal-burning stoves would have affected the white lintels more.
And the fascinating/mildly disturbing thing is that because the image looks so convincing to our expectations (which is what these sorts of models are best at achieving), everyone who sees it subconsciously accepts it as reality, even though most of these colors are probably wrong. It's not "restoring" the color, it's making it up. Even those of us who know better can fall into that trap if we aren't thinking about it.
Of course for a toy example like this it doesn't really matter. But at a large enough scale, something like this could subtly distort our collective concept of the past. More importantly, when applying ML models to much more impactful domains, they can easily create a more dangerous, subtle collective self-delusion about reality that by definition is very convincing even to its creators.
For a slightly more meaningful example: lots of people in the replies are posting pictures of their relatives, asking them to be colorized. In a very real way this model is subtly re-writing people's memories of what their loved ones looked like.
Of course for a toy example like this it doesn't really matter. But at a large enough scale, something like this could subtly distort our collective concept of the past. More importantly, when applying ML models to much more impactful domains, they can easily create a more dangerous, subtle collective self-delusion about reality that by definition is very convincing even to its creators.
For a slightly more meaningful example: lots of people in the replies are posting pictures of their relatives, asking them to be colorized. In a very real way this model is subtly re-writing people's memories of what their loved ones looked like.
"something like this could subtly distort our collective concept of the past"
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09
...really?
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09
...really?
Would these projects benefit from having real world reference colors?
Find the actual objects in the real world, like bricks, stones, paints, flowers, then sample them.
Find the actual objects in the real world, like bricks, stones, paints, flowers, then sample them.
Not perfect but pretty damn awesome!