The AI examples and reasoning in the article are exactly why this can't work, and is so unrealistic. The info isn't just hidden away in the info in a way some tool can figure out what it is with another effort, it's simply not present entirely. Any tool that tries to enhance a low quality image or video is just going to be making up the missing data.

It's not possible to magic details into existence that weren't there. So if you think a color was wrong, well, that is not something that can be solved other than by using a time machine or finding a separate reference picture. Any human restoration artist would be doing the exact same thing of guessing the color.

The second problem brought up is that ChatGPT is willing non-color details into existence that aren't in the original picture (eyebrows etc). For this it's simply that the public ChatGPT image generator wasn't made for this task. You'd have to build a custom harness but I'm sure it can be done.

I think, given you know some details about the film you're scanning and how it reacts to certain hues/brightnesses, you can remap colours from greyscale to a few possible colours right? Obviously it's not a 1:1 mapping since there's some data lost. (A dark blue is going to be a similar grey to a brown or something) but I'm almost certain there's old ML technology that essentially takes the most likely colour based on the context of the entire scene/some convolution matrix chunk of the scene, trained for specific film formulations.

Duplicates are not always what they seem - duplicates have a relative quantity of how duplicate they are, for example - 100% duplicate identical is what it sounds like, but then what is a 50% duplicate? Well.. that could be a duplicate where semantic meaning that only a human is aware of (missing information) could be used to determine that these two datum are in fact duplicates in different forms, where 50% is identical, but the other 50% is semantically identical. Or 50% truly identical could, in some case, be "good enough" to be considered identical. These are just examples.

Why this example is relevant is because, when deduplicating data, we often have to consider which value(s) we keep as the true singular representation.

The problem is, long after the data is created, this may be impossible to do.

The solution? Often times it is no better than flipping a coin and guessing, i.e. randomly keeping one datum and discarding what we consider to be the duplicate. Or you can try to be fancy and merge the data or choose, based on some rule, what you assume is the data with the highest valid signal and discard or ignore the noise.

This happens every day in practical information systems with messy data.

I always come to the conclusion that in the end, one cannot truly replace missing signal precisely - one can only infer the correct signal. If the information was not recorded and or compressed or corrupted beyond recoverability, there is no way to get it back - only to infer or guess with some degree of confidence, and accept or reject the outcome.

This to me actually clarifies something deeply about the conversion between the real world to the digital one as data, and the conversion of data into information- it is a real physical process.

In my mind it makes clear that the recording of data (or generation of data) is a real physical process of transfer, from an instrument making observations to physical bits in a physical system, which become the raw data.

Without the raw, precise, complete data, your observation is lossy, and therefore everything above it is as well- e.g. information/interpretation, etc.

This isn't a negative. If stated correctly, the above just helps to explain how we imperfectly navigate through the real world with our tools.

All the same, we can do some pretty amazing things in the absence of data, even if some of it is "false" or "wrong".

I don't know what the author thinks this could have meant, other than "give me the original". Making up details is what he is asking it to do.

True, you can't see the eyebrows in the original, but you also can't see (IMO) an absence of eyebrows and since far more people have eyebrows than not, I would be extremely surprised if it had come up with a version without them.

/s

(sorry for the censored swear)