AI’s ability to visualize old photographs in a more modern light, while interesting and possibly even helpful for humanistic study, has some issues. The example of how the AI recoloring of the black woman we saw in class was interesting. It had made her skin tone so much lighter, which I guess is a result of the program trying to take the less offensive middle gorund with colors, as it did with the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s just wrong sometimes, but these sytems are the best we have for the purposes of colorizing images right now. Putting those issues aside for now, I want to talk about how simple it was for us to be able to use AI to colorize an image. All we did was give Deoldify a URL of a black and white image and in a few seconds we were given a colorized version. It was so easy that anyone with access to a computer could do it!
In the How AI is Hijacking Art History reading, the author wrote about how media is attempting to paint AI in a better light by making it sound like a hero who was able to salvage knowledge about historical artifacts lost to time.
They have not, in actuality, revealed one secret or solved a single mystery. What they have done is generate feel-good stories about AI.
-Sonja Drimmer How AI is hijacking art history
We see the same thing happening with the personification of AI, technology that allows chatbots and such to replicate human voices and speech patterns even through text. These applications of technology are what I feel are part of the main reason people have such a fear of AI and how it will impact the future. I find it interesting that it has recently been painted as less of a tool and more of a companion, if that makes sense, which I feel raises many ethical questions about how we should be treating/using AI.
We risk turning over not only the historical sources but also entire methodologies to corporations.
-Lauren Tilton Relating to Historical Sources
There is currently a high potential for a lot of revenue to be gained through posting media like this due to the rising controversy and curiosity surrounding AI. It’s no different from an other flashy headline at its core, but I find the effects that articles that lean either way have had on AI. It truly is the next big thing right now, which I feel connects nicely with what the AHR reading brought up about the connections to capitalism. Many historical sources and methodologies are sort of being taken over by AI and I feel like we are already seeing the start of this with so many online tools implementing AI and many resources being hidden behind paywalls.
