4 ms·

> You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original, since it transmits more

by ev1 6y ago

> You might have millions of people watching an AI-changed film and think that what they are seeing is more accurate than the original, since it transmits more information (detail, color, etc). But if that additional information is made up, it's actually not more accurate, and maybe actually less accurate (i.e. wrong color instead of no color). That nuance is going to be hard for a lot of people to understand. I can confidently say there is a 100% chance that ML/AI-invented content (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine historical content in every possible way in terms of outreach. Just look at any "today in history" youtube or twitter channel and compare it to any actual museum or historical society's website/channel/social media. Orders of magnitude difference. On the tweets you see replies commenting about how beautiful and vibrant a [false colour, invented content] image is. Hell, those places will post blatantly totally false content (like.. a comedian) and say it's a historical image: https://time.com/5028121/history-twitter-photo/ https://time.com/5028121/history-twitter-photo/ They are not there for historical accuracy, or accuracy of any kind, those accounts are 100% purely to farm clicks and likes to spam with later.

codegladiator 6y ago
> ML/AI-invented content (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine historical content I think you are missing OPs point. Better (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) is not more accurate. Any change is worse from the original because now its modified (however ugly the original is). It suddenly becomes a fake.
- jerf 6y ago
  Then the original is a "fake" too. The past was not black and white, jittery, and silent. It isn't taking a true record and making it fake, it's taking a fake record and making it differently fake.
  - kibwen 6y ago
    This would be usefully true were it not for the fact that laypersons understand that the past was not black-and-white and silent. Nobody other than Calvin is misled into thinking that those records are faithful recreations of color and sound. But without those obvious markers, people lose their incredulity. What you're seeing in these modified records pretends to be real in a way that the originals do not. I would expect tech people to understand the risks here by comparison to using AI to perform image upscaling: you are inventing detail based on what the AI expects to see. For artificial works, this is often great. For, say, a police department trying to upscale grainy CCTV footage, it produces a work of fiction that has the potential to become outright dangerous. It's fine to present these as works of art, and with the proper context, even as records of history. But pop culture rapidly divorces the art from the context, and I would expect any responsible historian to be extremely clear about the processes use here, even to the point of protest (it is analogous to how astronomers have a hard time expressing to people that false-color photography and artistic illustrations of far-off bodies do not represent reality).
    - jerf 6y ago
      The conscious mind knows, and that only if you think to ask it. The subconscious does not. I wrote about this in reaction to one of the videos earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256369 I would assert that even with the errors, people get a more realistic view of the past through these reconstructions than by watching the original footage. The reconstructions drop the barrier of otherness, which greatly diminishes the value of the old footage as a historical lesson for the masses. The reconstructions make it seem like a real place that had real people in it. Moreover... what terrible, horrible thing are we worried about with these reconstructions anyhow? People will have slightly wrong ideas about what color roofs were in the past? People might have wrong ideas about exactly how slidey people's gaits were in the past? It's not like you feed in footage about a train ride or people riding horses down the street and the AI is adding in cell phones, translating people's speech to modern slang, and changing political posters to features modern politicians. We're fighting videos that increase people's connections to the past because we're afraid they... what, exactly? By all means keep the original and label the reconstructions, but I see no reason to start complaining about them or running around telling people "STOP! Watching these videos might give you WRONG IDEAS about COLORS! What if that BLUE WINDOW was in actuality MAUVE?" This seems more like Victorians having conspicuous cases of the vapors than a real concern.
  - vmh1928 6y ago
    Perhaps the Academic Historians are critical because enhanced and colorized documents make the past more understandable to lay people and reduce the need for the Academic Historian to define the historical context compared to looking at the world through a dirty, scratched up, black and white windshield.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    True, but the impressions made upon people, at that time in history, were monochrome, jittery and silent. Linking derivatives makes sense. Replacing original works does not. And the little things matter. We will learn how much over time, and ideally we keep originals to benefit from the lesson. Really, what we do by augmenting originals is lock in one best guess interpretation. The point of history is for people to go back and see what can be learned, not settle on what everyone should have learned.
- ev1 6y ago
  When I say outperforms, I mean in terms of raw # views/likes/outreach. I don't mean in terms of accuracy or anything.

by ev1 6y ago

codegladiator 6y ago

> ML/AI-invented content (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) already outperforms genuine historical content I think you are missing OPs point. Better (colours, fill-ins during upscaling, textures, etc.) is not more accurate. Any change is worse from the original because now its modified (however ugly the original is). It suddenly becomes a fake.

jerf 6y ago
Then the original is a "fake" too. The past was not black and white, jittery, and silent. It isn't taking a true record and making it fake, it's taking a fake record and making it differently fake.
- kibwen 6y ago
  This would be usefully true were it not for the fact that laypersons understand that the past was not black-and-white and silent. Nobody other than Calvin is misled into thinking that those records are faithful recreations of color and sound. But without those obvious markers, people lose their incredulity. What you're seeing in these modified records pretends to be real in a way that the originals do not. I would expect tech people to understand the risks here by comparison to using AI to perform image upscaling: you are inventing detail based on what the AI expects to see. For artificial works, this is often great. For, say, a police department trying to upscale grainy CCTV footage, it produces a work of fiction that has the potential to become outright dangerous. It's fine to present these as works of art, and with the proper context, even as records of history. But pop culture rapidly divorces the art from the context, and I would expect any responsible historian to be extremely clear about the processes use here, even to the point of protest (it is analogous to how astronomers have a hard time expressing to people that false-color photography and artistic illustrations of far-off bodies do not represent reality).
  - jerf 6y ago
    The conscious mind knows, and that only if you think to ask it. The subconscious does not. I wrote about this in reaction to one of the videos earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256369 I would assert that even with the errors, people get a more realistic view of the past through these reconstructions than by watching the original footage. The reconstructions drop the barrier of otherness, which greatly diminishes the value of the old footage as a historical lesson for the masses. The reconstructions make it seem like a real place that had real people in it. Moreover... what terrible, horrible thing are we worried about with these reconstructions anyhow? People will have slightly wrong ideas about what color roofs were in the past? People might have wrong ideas about exactly how slidey people's gaits were in the past? It's not like you feed in footage about a train ride or people riding horses down the street and the AI is adding in cell phones, translating people's speech to modern slang, and changing political posters to features modern politicians. We're fighting videos that increase people's connections to the past because we're afraid they... what, exactly? By all means keep the original and label the reconstructions, but I see no reason to start complaining about them or running around telling people "STOP! Watching these videos might give you WRONG IDEAS about COLORS! What if that BLUE WINDOW was in actuality MAUVE?" This seems more like Victorians having conspicuous cases of the vapors than a real concern.
- vmh1928 6y ago
  Perhaps the Academic Historians are critical because enhanced and colorized documents make the past more understandable to lay people and reduce the need for the Academic Historian to define the historical context compared to looking at the world through a dirty, scratched up, black and white windshield.
- ddingus 6y ago
  True, but the impressions made upon people, at that time in history, were monochrome, jittery and silent. Linking derivatives makes sense. Replacing original works does not. And the little things matter. We will learn how much over time, and ideally we keep originals to benefit from the lesson. Really, what we do by augmenting originals is lock in one best guess interpretation. The point of history is for people to go back and see what can be learned, not settle on what everyone should have learned.
ev1 6y ago
When I say outperforms, I mean in terms of raw # views/likes/outreach. I don't mean in terms of accuracy or anything.