
1900 NYC colorized by latest and unreleased DeOldify model - justinzollars
https://twitter.com/citnaj/status/1219156481762713602
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gbronner
Color palette leans too much towards purple, and the whites are far too bright
-- those people would be lucky to own two outfits, and keeping the shirts that
white on a daily basis without laundry facilities would have been impossible.
Not to mention the smoke and soot from coal-burning stoves would have affected
the white lintels more.

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_bxg1
And the fascinating/mildly disturbing thing is that because the image looks so
convincing to our expectations (which is what these sorts of models are best
at achieving), everyone who sees it subconsciously accepts it as reality, even
though most of these colors are probably wrong. It's not "restoring" the
color, it's making it up. Even those of us who know better can fall into that
trap if we aren't thinking about it.

Of course for a toy example like this it doesn't really matter. But at a large
enough scale, something like this could subtly distort our collective concept
of the past. More importantly, when applying ML models to much more impactful
domains, they can easily create a more dangerous, subtle collective self-
delusion about reality that by definition is very convincing even to its
creators.

For a slightly more meaningful example: lots of people in the replies are
posting pictures of their relatives, asking them to be colorized. In a very
real way this model is subtly re-writing people's memories of what their loved
ones looked like.

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perl4ever
"something like this could subtly distort our collective concept of the past"

[https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09](https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2014/11/09)

...really?

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specialist
Would these projects benefit from having real world reference colors?

Find the actual objects in the real world, like bricks, stones, paints,
flowers, then sample them.

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dasanman
Not perfect but pretty damn awesome!

