I Was Never That Young

I was catching up with and having a delightful FaceTime with an old friend whom I’ve known since first grade today and was telling him about ChatGPT’s ability to do decent photo restoration and pointed him to the images from 1983 that I’d posted a couple days ago. “Is that Steve?” he asked, while simultaneously sending me a photo of Steve I’d taken in 1979. I said yes, and he sent another long-forgotten photo of Brian, a boyfriend who I dated around the same time. He then followed up with two photos of me that I’d completely forgotten about because I didn’t have the originals in my albums any longer—probably because I’d sent them to him years ago. I had other photos from that shoot, but these were missing. Both were blurry and either under- or over-exposed.

What the heck, I thought, and I fed them into the AI monster with the prompt, “Restore, sharpen, and adjust exposure.”

I have to say, when AI gets it right, it gets it very right.

Here’s the before and after of the other photo:

As I titled this post, “I was never that young.” But I was, Blanche, I was in that chair!

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