# News Article: NYT using AI to help digitize millions of archival photographs



## anotherlayer (Sep 14, 2020)

So, I caught this article from Popular Science. Of course my initial excitement was reading the headline. My cringing started at the article itself. Have a look:

The New York Times is using AI to help digitize millions of archival photographs

Right off the bat, this is unnerving. The late 1800s? I believe the NYT started prior to the Civil War. I fear this will be just another Shorpy exhibit. Where all the photographs are from the same photographer and all the white handwritten text on the photos will be from the same hand.


> The basement of The New York Times, lovingly known as “the morgue,” has an impressive archive of some six to eight million photographs *dating back to the late 1800s*. And with the help of Google Cloud, these historic images and the data, much of it hand written, will soon be digitized.


Worry #2. A win for the editors (is this stuff just written truth in plain sight or am I being overly tinfoil?).


> The photos will eventually live in an asset management system that will allow Times editors to search the archive and discover forgotten and untold stories.


6 to 8 million photographs. I could spend hours going through them and I reckon I may still never get the chance.


> Ultimately the hope is that the collaboration will make the history in The New York Times’ archives more universally accessible and useful.





> Note: This OP was recovered from the KeeperOfTheKnowledge archive.





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## Whitewave (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: whitewaveDate: 2018-11-17 21:40:43Reaction Score: 9


It's frightening to think that the agency responsible for archiving and preserving our history are the ones "losing" evidence of our history. It's a government-funded, government-run facility. Where is the oversight?


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## KD Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: KorbenDallasDate: 2018-11-17 23:43:10Reaction Score: 8




anotherlayer said:


> Worry #2.


 LOL. If we ever get to see whatever they have in there, I'm pretty sure it's gonna be safe for our eyes, and for the world history concept.

Funny how they said that they have up to 8 mln photographs, and only their editors will have access to those.

It appears that our understanding of this world has been getting "edited" for a very long time.


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## Whitewave (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: whitewaveDate: 2018-11-18 07:25:55Reaction Score: 10


Just learned today that Texas passed a law that schools can only teach that the Civil War was about slavery. No mention of states rights, economic factors, Federal Reserve Bank, etc. It was all about freeing the slaves that 1% of the South owned (there were slaves in the North too) and Lincoln himself said that it was about preserving the union and not freeing the slaves but the narrative must be maintained. The history that's being stolen isn't just something that happened 1-2 hundred years ago (or more); it's happening as we speak.
There was a big push in the early 2000's to get rid of libraries because who needs books when you have the internet and can download any information you need? Thankfully, there are enough bibliophiles such as myself that that hasn't happened yet. I dread a day when everything is digitized and easily hackable so that our information can be changed as fast as the editors can type it.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: Ice NineDate: 2018-11-18 14:47:08Reaction Score: 3


If everything is digitized, when we are gone there will be no record of any of us, except for the petrified remains of some of our buildings.


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## Archive (Apr 26, 2021)

> Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: LordAverageDate: 2018-11-18 18:52:20Reaction Score: 5


This is actually pretty scary. Soon enough when everything is digitized the originals can be "put away somewhere" or "lost" but it will be okay because we have the flawless digitized by AI copies )))). No bias or editing will happen of course (not like we have already seen that with blacked out or blurred out flags in civil war pics etc.)


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