Enhancement

Over at Microsoft Image Creator, new AI tools are being created all the time. A new offering allows users to quickly enhance old photographs - bringing them alive as never before. Here are two pictures I have recently put through the system . They are both of my late parents - Philip and Doreen.

They married in New Delhi, India having met there in the early nineteen forties. They were both in the Royal Air Force and had been sent to India along with thousands of other British servicemen and women who had signed up for military service in 1940.

My mother was from a coal-mining family in South Yorkshire and my father was from a humble family of North Yorkshire farm workers. I believe the picture below was taken in Rajasthan, during their brief honeymoon in early 1946 - before they returned home to England. World War II was over by then and the Japanese imperial threats upon India had been successfully averted. Mum would have been twenty five and Dad would have been thirty one.

Eighteen years later and they now live in the village schoolhouse where I was born in the middle of The East Riding of Yorkshire. Dad is now fifty years old and Mum is forty three. In both pictures she is holding a cigarette. Dad is the village school's headmaster. 

I know exactly when this picture was taken because I was the photographer. It's Saturday October 10th 1964 - two days after my eleventh birthday. I had been given my first camera and this picture was one of the first thirty six I ever took. I developed and printed them myself with my father's guidance.

They were just about to drive to Hull to shop at the "Savemore Stores" near King Billy's golden statue. They did that most Saturday mornings - saving money to feed a family of six.

Behind them is the old schoolhouse and the Bedford van that my father bought with a view to transporting school sports teams in it even though it was primarily a "family car".

Well, I was quite happy with both enhanced images above. Then I asked Microsoft Image Creator to enhance the following picture. It is of my coal-mining great grandfather -  Arthur Jackson, the father of my mother's father Wilfred Henry Jackson...

And here's the AI enhanced picture...

But wait a minute! The picture has not just been enhanced. It has utterly changed my great grandfather's head and hairstyle. No longer do we see a proud, timeworn coal miner in his best suit. Instead, we seem to be looking at a well-groomed bank manager or a headteacher. It was most disappointing to me that AI had the audacity to do such a thing. And the chair back is very different too. 

Here's a close up of Arthur Jackson's head as he stares at us from a hundred years ago:-

And here's the AI impostor, sans moustache:-

At least the AI enhanced images of my parents did not turn them into other people. They are recognisably themselves.