AI photo restoration tools are fabricating faces and erasing your family's real history

AI photo restoration is erasing your family's real history

My parents have discovered the wonders of ChatGPT, and have been gleefully using it for everything they can think of. I've had "the chat" with them about the reliability of LLMs, but like most people they do indulge in social media fads from time to time. Whether it's using ChatGPT to turn you into an action figure, or cartoonizing yourself, they're now well-versed in uploading photos to a chatbot as part of a prompt. Looking through their post history on Facebook recently, it seems the latest thing to do is give the AI some old family photos that are damaged, faded, or don't have much or any color, and ask it to "restore" the photo. The result is a shiny, modern-looking photo, but there's a big problem: that's not my mom and dad in the photos! Why AI photo restoration tools have exploded in popularity Grandma likes getting likes It's no surprise that using AI to "restore" a photo has become pretty popular. Photoshop is hard, and even with modern tools and a skilled artist it can take many hours to restore a photo. In contrast, the AI will spit out a new photo for you in seconds, ready to share online. Sites like Facebook, after all, trade on nostalgia, so posting shiny new versions of old photos is almost guaranteed to attract fawning likes and comments from your old classmates or extended family. Restoration vs. fabrication: Where the line actually is Just close enough to be weird There is, however, a huge issue here. Generative AI technologies don't "restore" anything; It's creating an entirely new photo using the original as an input. At first glance, and a lot of people will give it no more than that, it seems like the same photo. However, if you take a minute to examine the details, it's different in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Here's a historical family photo taken from the Library of Congress. To illustrate the problem, I've run it through ChatGPT with the prompt "Restore this photo to look like it was taken today." People who are doing this online are either using similar prompts, or they are using AI "restoration" tools that use a similar prompt internally, but hide it from the user. Take a good close look at the AI-generated image. Not only has the AI extended the frame to include details that were never there, it's also changed details like the poster on the wall. However, the most important issue here are the faces and poses of the people in the photo. It's like someone hired a bunch of lookalikes to sit for the same photo. These are not the same people! It can be hard to tell people apart that you don't know well, but when my dad posts a photo of himself that's been through the AI mill it's obviously (and disturbingly) not his face in the resulting image. What's even worse, when he posts photos of himself from before I was born, I can't tell which was his real face without putting the photos side-by-side, because I don't have the real-world memories of his face during that time. Adobe Photoshop Take your creativity to new places. Crop and expand images, adjust color, add and remove objects, and more with Photoshop on desktop, web, and mobile. Check plans at Adobe Expand Collapse Why the changes matter more than you think It's not just innocent fun The further back you go, the bigger the problem becomes. I never met my grandfathers in person, so photographs are the only evidence I have of what they looked like, or what my older family looked like when they were younger. These photos are a link to my personal family history. Now I see people all over the internet voluntarily replacing their family members with creepy doppelgängers in photos of places that didn't exist. If I were you, I'd destroy those AI images immediately and make safe, unaltered digital backup of my family photos on several long-term storage media. How to preserve authenticity while still improving old photos It takes effort, but it can be done When you hire a professional person to restore a photo, then, like an AI, that person can't recover information that's not present in the original photo. However, a trained restoration artist knows how to preserve a person's genuine features and won't alter anything in the image more than they have to. Subscribe for deeper coverage of AI photo restorations Explore how AI "restorations" can rewrite family images -- subscribe to the newsletter for focused coverage on photo authenticity, generative changes, and analysis of how to distinguish genuine photos from AI-generated versions. Get Updates By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime. Even when old photos are colorized, the color choices are informed through research to get as close to reality as possible. Your typical AI tool isn't even trying to do this. However, does that mean it's impossible to restore photos properly without the use of AI? Not quite. For example, in this guide by PIXimperfect you can see a workflow using a mix of traditional photo editing tools and tunable AI filters that let you keep the exact original facial features, and gives you a way to compare the results to the original photo to double-check that not a wrinkle or line is out of place. But, of course, most people will just take the easy route of clicking a button and seeing a new photo come out a few seconds later. Still, you have to ask yourself if it's worth potentially erasing the real faces and places that make up your family history, and perhaps making it so your own children will never know what their grandparents actually looked like. Personally, I don't think it is.

'Restoring' Old Photos With AI Is a Fundamentally Broken Concept

When I was in college, I had the opportunity to spend a semester abroad in Florence, Italy to study. There, I took a "Chemistry of Art" class that culminated in a visit to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, where priceless works of art are on display. It is also where many are stored and maintained. The Opificio, as it was colloquially referred to, is not just a museum, but also a teaching facility that is directly tied to Florence's Ministry for Cultural and Environmental Heritage. As part of my class, we spent a day at the Opificio learning what the scientists did there as a practical example of the chemistry knowledge we spent a semester learning. As we were touring one of their laboratories, one of the scientists there said that they, and many others at the Opificio, had a strong distaste for the word "restoration" as it applies to art. While that is the most common way to refer to what they do, they as scientists and lovers of art did not think of what they did as restoration. To them, to restore was far too active of a verb. The idea of restoration carries with it the intrinsic connotation of adding or subtracting something. The word itself means to "bring back" or "reinstate." But if some part of a piece of artwork is lost to the point that it needs to be brought back, then that means someone in the present day would have to add what they believe is missing. At the very least, it means someone who is not the original artist has to put a hand on the work and adjust it. But how could they possibly do that and retain respect for what was there? The scientists argued they couldn't. They wouldn't. They much preferred to think of themselves as art conservationists. To conserve means to protect what is there, prevent further damage, and to honor it as it is. Take nothing away, add nothing back. This approach shows immense respect for the art, the artist, and the living history of the piece of work. It is why I think the idea of "restoring" old photos, as ON1 tried to showcase earlier this week, is a fundamentally broken concept. The problem is that for things like soft scans, where you are presumably trying to recover details, any restoration -- by hand or by AI -- is just adding those details. They aren't there, so they must be built and inserted. With AI's involvement, the results are only worsened. If a human cannot in good conscience restore a photo even with all of the burden of knowledge of that task, how can an unfeeling AI do anything close to a good job? It is a blunt instrument, brute forcing its way across visual history with not a single care for the damage its footfalls cause. That is why we're seeing such grotesque results and, even when they're believable (such as in the group photo example below), the identity of the people is greatly changed. After publication of our original story, ON1 emailed to apologize, saying that the team had inadvertently sent examples in the press kit that weren't meant to be in there. They further explained that the Restore AI tool was meant to be part of a broader workflow that the examples didn't include. I argue that doesn't matter, and that the fundamental problem here is due to the process, not the quality of the technology.