A question of ethics and AI
Dean Scutt
@dean_scutt7 Jul
A question of ethics and AI
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I recently had a lab ruin some film with our of date chemicals, the images were there, barely, so I wondered what would happen if I fed them to AI and asked it to restore the images with the film stock as a reference. I'm typically again AI in image making but in a case like this where the image content is not being altered and it's either that or no image at all, trip ruined, what would you do?
Hey dean I think the body of your post might have been cut off, when you make a post here you can put a short piece of text in for a title then some longer text in for the main post. I think you can edit and add it in retrospectively.
Gotcha, sorted
What is your "question"?
Interesrting, to me this isnt much difference than using the denoise tool from lightroom or something like that...? Tricky one I guess as you can see it has taken some licence with the text on the poster in the shot with the guy with the hat 😅
Some small details it definitely took liberties but I was impressed overall how accurate to the original images it stayed. No amount of lightroom could have got those images back, I did try.
Was this applied to the scans you already got from the lab, or to an unconveted scan of the negative? I wonder how it does with the negs themselves...
To the scans from the lab, but if that was a feature in negative lab pro would we even question it?
Well, interestingly the process at the base of AI generated images IS denoising😁
I would make it part of the story. If your up front about it and say why and how AI was used I think that adds to the narrative.
Yeah not long ago if a lab ruined your film that was it, done, these things are just tools, intent and how we use them is what matters. Especially when rectifying someone elses cock up haha
As long as you accept that it is not able to restore lost information but just fills in the blanks... the face might not be the face of a real person, and it might just invent stuff... also most tools today are leaving steganographic watermarks. So your image will probably be flagged to be AI generated
Yeah I accept all that, but there were photos of friends on that roll that were 100% them and I'm glad I could save and share those with them
I actually really like that shot on the train so it would be a shame to waste it, had these tools not existed. I think occasions like this are on the list of AI being used for good - recovering art or memories that would otherwise be lost forever.
You deployed "AI" to restore images made otherwise irretrievable by bad lab handling. You did not add or alter the images' contents. You were not misrepresenting the original image content. There is no "ethics" issue, especially if these images were created for your own amusement.
If restoration of terrible image negatives was an ethical violation several photographers, notably Robert Frank for example, would be absolutely unknown. His printer didn't just restore some of his negative....he resurrected them.