AI attempted to restore the world’s oldest photograph, failed epically, and now I can’t stop laughing at the results

Restoring historic photographs is often done in an attempt to get a glimpse of the colors and details that the earliest cameras were unable to capture – but one Redditor has asked ChatGPT to restore the world’s oldest photographs, and the results are going viral.

Joseph Niepce’s “héliographie” View from the Window at Le Gras is widely believed to be the oldest surviving photograph. The Frenchman took the image around 1826 before the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, using a camera obscura and a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea. (Despite the name, the historic camera obscura isn’t a camera in the modern sense of the word; artists used camera obscuras to project a scene to trace, but they didn’t result in a photograph until the invention of light-sensitive materials to record an image from one.)

I asked ChatGPT to restore and colorize the world's first image from r/ChatGPT

The historic image has been the subject of recreations by artists and historians over the years, but a Reddit user recently decided to see if ChatGPT was up to the task of “restoring” the old photograph. The resulting generation depicts a wonky rooftop and a church spire instead of a tree, among other oddities in the recreation.

The generated image has proven to be an inspiration for further AI attempts at recreating the oldest surviving photograph, creating a Reddit thread that I find quite entertaining as a photographer, including some laughable results. Some took the prompt seriously and tried recreating the image with other AIs, like Google’s Gemini.

Comment from r/ChatGPT

Others took the humorous route. One commenter added a spaceship to the AI generation in mockery of the odd shape of the roof. Others created futuristic and cartoon versions of the same window view.

Comment from r/ChatGPT

Some of the AI’s guffaws likely stem from the lack of clarity in the original image. While there’s some disagreement over how long the photograph took to create, the general consensus is that the original photograph is an exposure that took between several hours and several days. That long exposure likely created shifting shadows that are adding to the confusion over what exactly is in the grainy black and white photograph. The original image was taken out of a second-story window and is a view of a courtyard and outbuildings.

But along with serving as internet humor, the thread is generating discussion over using AI as art “restoration,” with several commenters posting artist-made recreations of the scene. Others have taken the AI generation as an example of the shortcomings of generative AI.

One of my personal favorite comments? “Can you ask it to restore my faith in humanity?” one Redditor wrote.

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