I still can't make my mind up about AI.
Artificial intelligence (AI) colourising programmes are all the rage: smart little apps where you can feed a monochrome image in at one end, and a beautifully realistic full-colour rendition emerges from the other end. To be honest, sometimes it is beautiful, sometimes realistic and sometimes it is colourful, but rarely all three. And sometimes it has the look of the kind of thing a three-year old, fed too much chocolate and given too many coloured crayons, would produce. I get to thinking that the old, faded, and bleached-out vision of faces from a bygone era is more lifelike than some daisy-fresh technicolour dream. And then I feed another old Victorian pasteboard photo into the AI machine and see life emerge, and it takes me back to the thrill I used to get when black and white images would slowly emerge from a dish of developer solution. And that was a thrill that is still vivid to me. I keep promising myself that, one day, I'll go back to wet film techniques.
As I say, I can't make my mind up about AI. I will spend the day with these two colourful but unknown Victorian girls (from a collection of old photographs I have of relatives from Sussex) and see what they say about artificial intelligence.
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