GoKawiilMy brother is eight years old in this photograph. He’s kneeling in our front yard in South Bend, late in the summer of 1976, squinting into the sun. His jeans have tan patches on the knees. His tan tank top has brown piping around the neck and arms. I know these things because I was there, and after 50 years I somehow still remember.
I was experimenting with AI colorization of some black-and-white scans, curious what the technology could actually do.
I told it the colors I remembered. The cedar shingles were dull green. The gable was white. His jeans were blue with those tan patches. ChatGPT took all of that readily enough. The house’s green isn’t exactly right, but it’s close. There’s a neighbor’s car in the background that I remember but only vaguely — ChatGPT coloring it pale blue works well enough.
Then I looked at my brother’s face. ChatGPT had given him eyebrows — and got them wrong. That’s not my brother anymore. It’s an impostor.
You can’t see his eyebrows on the b/w scan. I shot that negative with a simple camera on drug-store film, and digitized it with one of those “digitizers” you can buy on Amazon for a hundred bucks. Maybe it just didn’t pull out all of the information from the negative.
Then I remembered I’d also scanned the same negative on an Epson V300 flatbed with SilverFast, a much better setup. It brought out more detail and richer tonality. Yet even this didn’t reveal my brother’s eyebrows. The eyebrows were never on the negative to begin with.
The AI had no way to know that. It saw a face with missing information and filled the gap.
I also asked ChatGPT to colorize a print scan I made a long time ago of this road crew building what would become US 40 in east-central Illinois in the early 1920s. This was a small print of maybe three inches on the long side. The Canon CanoScan 9000F scanner I used is quite capable, but it can resolve only so much information from such a print.
I had an ace up my sleeve this time — I have actual photographs of these bricks as they looked in 2007 as an abandoned road. I shared them with ChatGPT and asked it to colorize using the photos as a reference.
ChatGPT did well with the bricks (but to be fair, even then it had to guess at which bricks were which color). The tar under the bricks went black. It wasn’t a stretch for ChatGPT to guess that eastern Illinois grass is green and dirt is brown. The workers got faded blues and grays and tans that looked right for the era, at least based on the modern movies set in that era that I’ve watched. But there’s no way to know what color any of their clothes were that day.
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