We may have a new candidate for our roundup of botched art restorations. And this time it isn't an over-enthusiastic amateur human restorer who took their own hand to the work responsible, but AI.
A Chat GPT user decided to ask OpenAI's chatbot to 'restore and colorize' the world's oldest photograph. People have been quick to point out that result probably bears little resemblance to the scene that Joseph Nicéphore Niépce saw from the window of his estate in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes.
I asked ChatGPT to restore and colorize the world's first image from r/ChatGPT
Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras is widely believed to be the oldest surviving photograph made with the aid of a camera obscura. The French inventor captured the image in 1826 using heliography, a process he invented in which he used bitumen to record the image.
The exposure is estimated to have lasted anything between eight hours and several days. Almost two hundred years later, ChatGPT took a few seconds to 'restore' the photo for a Reddit user, but not without taking a few liberties of its own.
Comment from r/ChatGPT
“Totally inaccurate rendering — and that is not surprising,” writes one person, who has seen the image on display at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, pointing out that the AI model failed to detect the bright sunlight in the centre of the image and that the tall object in the background is a tree not a tower. Others point out the the buildings don't look accurate for the place of period.
Soon, other ChatGPT users were trying it themselves in an attempt to get better results, with some using web search to check historical data in an effort to get more accurate period details. That's not convincing people either, with some comparing the image to a scene from Italy in the video game Counter-Strike. And suddenly the world's oldest photo on its way to becoming an internet meme.
Comment from r/ChatGPT
AI photo restoration tools can do a reasonable job at cleaning up old photos because they use deep learning trained to recognise and remove damage like scratches and tears while also sharpening. But there's a problem with many generative AI tools, not just those related to images.
As anyone who's used Google search recently will have noticed, when AI doesn't know the answer, it makes things up. And Niépce's heliograph doesn't give a lot for an AI to go on because it's so unclear.
Interestingly, The Spéos Paris Photographic Institute already used computers to painstakingly reconstruct and then recreate Niépce's image for a short documentary 25 years ago, long before Chat GPT appeared.
Comment from r/ChatGPT
For your own photography, see our pick of the best photo editing software and the best monitors for photo editing. You might also want to see my take on using a drawing tablet for photo editing.
