As long as they're not GenAI altered photos, I'm cool with these things.

I'm a pretty avid member of various history groups, and one thing that has absolutely driven me nuts for the past couple of years is how many people there are that use AI for upscaling and colorization of photos - not knowing or noticing how the models fundamentally alter the photos. A couple of zooms in on the photo, and it is nightmare fuel.

A week ago me and some members spent a couple of hours trying to find a building from the early 1900s, because someone had uploaded a photo and asked about the building. Sifted through old maps, newspapers, etc. but couldn't find anything. Turns out said photo had been upscaled via AI, which in turn had added some buildings here and there.

But, yeah, for stuff like OP posted it could work out nicely.

It really says something about the current state of affairs that after reading the headline, my first thought was oh god no, the photos are probably all hallucinated...

But it's actually really cool how they used AI to better determine the locations of the photos. I love this!

AI had been a super useful for processing historical data. Interviewed a volunteer last month from the diary archive in Germany, and they're using supervised AI for diary transcription. Going from (old) personalized hand script to text is a lot of work, even for experienced transcribers. Being able to automate the first pass of that has been a huge boon to their processing pipeline.

Its funny that author posted a very cool use of AI to help filter/organize and OCR hard to read text about a large photoset and built a great way to visualize his ongoing project with a lot of innovation and cool output..

But the majority of the commnents (including the top comment) on this thread are about how bad AI Images are and how bad AI is in general, how it is altering history etc -when the author didn't even do any of that in his post

It shows the mindset of the community these days more so than the technology.

I checked 3 spots I'm familiar with and 1 is wrong

https://www.oldnyc.org/#707133f-a this is supposed to be here https://www.oldnyc.org/#702487f-a

also, if folks are interested in these old depictions of NYC, check out https://1940s.nyc/ as well!

I have mixed feelings about this. It's absolutely phenomenal that such a treasure trove was unlocked thanks to AI, but presenting the AI results are "definitive" (even with an "edit" or "report" feature that's applied equally to human-located and AI-located results) isn't really a win. The old dataset might have been incomplete, but where locations were determined, they were a result of a (probably neural/autistic/ocd) human contributor that had some measure of true confidence in the results. AI contributions are great, but imho they should never be allowed to freely mix with and dilute human contributions: the resulting dataset is permanently polluted.

Ideally they'd always carry an "AI-generated" flag (in the db and in the frontend) until manually reviewed (or never) by a human. If anything, this is actually in AI proponent's favor as it would let you periodically regenerate or cross-validate (a subset of) the AI contributions some years down the line when newer and better models are released!

As someone with a massive collection of antique postmarked postcards (probably the largest in the world for a particular city), this is very helpful and encouraging for getting my collection online.

I love this! Thanks for sharing. My job involves reviewing old maps and documents, and I have a special place in my heart for easily accessible archives.

So much cool stuff is freely available at libraries but in practice no one visits them anymore.

This is pretty sweet. Funny seeing all the dots circling around New York and then abruptly stopping at Jersey City.

Very cool! I am surprised at the use of 4o, but I guess it was pretty good at OCR for its time

Super cool project, nice work.

If the images are "edited by AI" then they are not. They are prompted by the source image, but a new image is generated.

I haven't seen an "AI edited" image that hasn't changed important details, and so the result is just yet more slop.

Can you go a bit deeper on this?

If the risk of mistranslation is high, I fail to comprehend how letting AI "take a swing at it" does not reduce the translation quality?

How are they ensure no drop in translation quality?

Can you please explain to me how using AI as a "first pass" (in any context) doesn't simply make the second pass more lazy?

If my name is associated with the first pass, and I get it wrong, there's a gravity to that since my name's attached. If I use an AI for the first pass, get it wrong, and my names still attached... my name takes a hit, BUT, my guilt and desire to improve is absolved a little bit by the existence of the AI tool taking on the first pass. After all, it wasn't me who got it wholly and completely wrong, it was the AI. Next time I'll be more careful, right? Rinse and repeat.

I hadn't considered or read about this problem before but it makes sense.

It reminds me of the cuneiform problem. Between 500,000 and 1 million tablets have been collected. This is one of the earliest preserved writing systems. Even so, fewer than 10% of these tablets have been translated. I was surprised to learn this but it makes sense. There are several problems:

1. Scribes used a lot of shorthand;

2. Cuneiform itself changed over time;

3. Writers would use multiple languages (eg Sumerian, Akkadian), even on the same tablet. There are relatively few people fluent in these languages, particularly in multiple of them at once;

4. To some extent the tablets are 3D such that a 2D photo might not be sufficient to translate because you might need to physically turn the tablet to accurately see the marks; and

5. In some cases the tablets are incomplete or broken so you may not to figure out how things fit together.

I wonder if AI can help make inroads into this 90%. I really wonder what is waiting to be unearthed.

(Author here) IIUC you're saying that 707133f-a should be at 5th Ave & 9th Street, not 5th Ave & Union Street? Can you say more about why? The text on the back of the first image says "Union St. Station, 5th Ave," which is how it winds up at there. On the other hand, the NYPL page[1] titles the image "Union St. - 18th St."

(I briefly got excited that there might be a street sign _in_ the photo, but if you zoom way in it says "DENTIST")

+1 to 1940s.nyc. Very different photos — those are were taken for tax assessment, the ones on OldNYC were taken to document the city as it changed. The photographer had an arrangement where he'd get tips from demolition crews, and go shoot buildings before they were gone forever.

[1]: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5a5e06a0-c539-012f...

An elephant in the room is that if you have too much data to process without AI, you have too many results to check for correctness when they come out of the AI.

This has been true since before LLMs, but now so many more people and use cases are enabled so much more easily. People are undisciplined and quick to take short term gains and handwave the correctness.

Some other historical street view websites:

https://yesterdays.maprva.org/#11.5/37.5438/-77.4392 (specific to Richmond, Virginia, however deployments for other areas are in work)

https://pastvu.com/