Comment by ev1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ev1 | Hacker News Reader

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> 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 already outperforms genuine historical content in every possible way in terms of outreach.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/

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.

> 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 already outperforms genuine historical content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.

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.

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).

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

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.

The reconstructions drop the barrier of otherness, which greatly diminishes the value of the old footage as a historical lesson for the masses.

I think you make a very important point. I watched lots of silent movies as well as historical footage growing up, and the jerky motion and slow frame rates gave them a cartoonish quality that I still find artistically endearing but which makes history less real to the viewer. For historical figures one admires, it confers a sort of mythic aura, and for ones you don't it makes them seem clownish or misshapen. This impacts written history too, where it's already hard to separate our posterior knowledge of how things turned out from the historical figures of whom we have a visually distorted mental image.

I watched a historical series on WW2 where the imagery was colorized and somewhat stabilized/cleaned up a year or so ago and was struck by the different perspective it offered without all the 'emotional blurring' that occurs due to the technical limitations of the time. It was much easier to relate to events, both good and bad, through a 'happening now' frame of reference that would have been closer to what people experienced at the time, when newsreel footage offered immediacy and accuracy that was new and modern.

No doubt in the future there will be debates over whether HD and 4k footage of today and the recent past should be given the full VR treatment, allowing people to experience current events from the point of view of the participants and so forth.

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.

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.

When I say outperforms, I mean in terms of raw # views/likes/outreach. I don't mean in terms of accuracy or anything.

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