My parents have discovered the wonders of ChatGPT, and have been gleefully using it for everything they can think of. I’ve had “the chat” with them about the reliability of LLMs, but like most people they do indulge in social media fads from time to time. Whether it’s using ChatGPT to turn you into an action figure, or cartoonizing yourself, they’re now well-versed in uploading photos to a chatbot as part of a prompt.
Looking through their post history on Facebook recently, it seems the latest thing to do is give the AI some old family photos that are damaged, faded, or don’t have much or any color, and ask it to “restore” the photo. The result is a shiny, modern-looking photo, but there’s a big problem: that’s not my mom and dad in the photos!
Grandma likes getting likes
It’s no surprise that using AI to “restore” a photo has become pretty popular. Photoshop is hard, and even with modern tools and a skilled artist it can take many hours to restore a photo. In contrast, the AI will spit out a new photo for you in seconds, ready to share online.
Sites like Facebook, after all, trade on nostalgia, so posting shiny new versions of old photos is almost guaranteed to attract fawning likes and comments from your old classmates or extended family.
Restoration vs. fabrication: Where the line actually is
Just close enough to be weird
There is, however, a huge issue here. Generative AI technologies don’t “restore” anything; It’s creating an entirely new photo using the original as an input. At first glance, and a lot of people will give it no more than that, it seems like the same photo. However, if you take a minute to examine the details, it’s different in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
Here’s a historical family photo taken from the Library of Congress. To illustrate the problem, I’ve run it through ChatGPT with the prompt “Restore this photo to look like it was taken today.” People who are doing this online are either using similar prompts, or they are using AI “restoration” tools that use a similar prompt internally, but hide it from the user.
Take a good close look at the AI-generated image. Not only has the AI extended the frame to include details that were never there, it’s also changed details like the poster on the wall. However, the most important issue here are the faces and poses of the people in the photo. It’s like someone hired a bunch of lookalikes to sit for the same photo. These are not the same people!
It can be hard to tell people apart that you don’t know well, but when my dad posts a photo of himself that’s been through the AI mill it’s obviously (and disturbingly) not his face in the resulting image. What’s even worse, when he posts photos of himself from before I was born, I can’t tell which was his real face without putting the photos side-by-side, because I don’t have the real-world memories of his face during that time.
Why the changes matter more than you think
It’s not just innocent fun
The further back you go, the bigger the problem becomes. I never met my grandfathers in person, so photographs are the only evidence I have of what they looked like, or what my older family looked like when they were younger. These photos are a link to my personal family history.
Now I see people all over the internet voluntarily replacing their family members with creepy doppelgängers in photos of places that didn’t exist. If I were you, I’d destroy those AI images immediately and make safe, unaltered digital backup of my family photos on several long-term storage media.
How to preserve authenticity while still improving old photos
It takes effort, but it can be done
When you hire a professional person to restore a photo, then, like an AI, that person can’t recover information that’s not present in the original photo. However, a trained restoration artist knows how to preserve a person’s genuine features and won’t alter anything in the image more than they have to.
Even when old photos are colorized, the color choices are informed through research to get as close to reality as possible. Your typical AI tool isn’t even trying to do this.
However, does that mean it’s impossible to restore photos properly without the use of AI? Not quite. For example, in this guide by PIXimperfect you can see a workflow using a mix of traditional photo editing tools and tunable AI filters that let you keep the exact original facial features, and gives you a way to compare the results to the original photo to double-check that not a wrinkle or line is out of place.
But, of course, most people will just take the easy route of clicking a button and seeing a new photo come out a few seconds later. Still, you have to ask yourself if it’s worth potentially erasing the real faces and places that make up your family history, and perhaps making it so your own children will never know what their grandparents actually looked like. Personally, I don’t think it is.
