One issue that arises from the colorization of images with current software or artificial intelligence is that the colorized images can be inaccurate, which can be harmful to the historical significance of certain issues. For example, it was quite worrying to see how wrong the AI made the image of the woman in class. It started as a colored photo, and was then transformed to grayscale, and finally the AI colorized it. The AI heavily lightened the skin of the woman in the photo, which is very harmful both to the historical significance of the image, but also to the identity of this woman because it literally changed her skin color. It is extremely harmful to make photos more of a middleground, because it removes the outliers from history.
These recreations don’t teach us anything we didn’t know about the artists and their methods.
Drimmer, Sonja. “How AI Is Hijacking Art History.” The Conversation, November 1, 2021. http://theconversation.com/how-ai-is-hijacking-art-history-170691.
The article mentions that we actually aren’t learning anything new, but rather just basically rephrasing art when using AI on art. This was a very interesting point because many people assumed that when something was put out and marketed as a new find that was made using AI, that it was something that produced new artistic knowledge. But in reality, the article describes the fact that these new paintings and findings by AI do not actually provide any new historical information about techniques or the artistic, but rather seems to make AI seem less harmful and biased than it truly is.
These studies and projects also seem to promote the idea that computer scientists are more adept at historical research than art historians.
Drimmer, Sonja. “How AI Is Hijacking Art History.” The Conversation, November 1, 2021. http://theconversation.com/how-ai-is-hijacking-art-history-170691.
Additionally, this article mentions this idea that the use of AI in this way makes it seem like art historians are no longer needed because there is a computer to do their job. In this sense, it is important to look into the fact that art historians have been around and been doing this job for a lot longer than AI has been around. This article also explains that art historians are actually performing jobs that discover relevant findings and new historical information, while AI lacks these skills.
