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Question about using AI to find old family photos | AI Innovations - Opinions Matter

Question about using AI to find old family photos

Last month I was helping my aunt in Seattle sort through boxes of old photos. We had hundreds with no dates or names. I tried an AI tool called PhotoPrism that scanned them all and used facial recognition to group people. It found 12 photos of my great-grandfather I never knew we had. Anyone else used something like this for family history stuff?

4 comments

4 Comments

hollym826mo ago

What gets me is how this tech changes the stories themselves... my mom had a photo labeled as her uncle for years, but an AI said it was someone else. Now that "fact" is in our digital records, and the real story about why she thought it was him is getting lost. It's not just about wrong tags, it's about replacing family memories with computer guesses that sound official. Once that wrong info gets shared around, the actual truth fades away. Feels like we're trading our messy, real history for a clean, fake one.

sandra_kim7mo ago

Honestly that sounds like a privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Uploading all your family's private pictures to some random AI service just seems risky. Tbh the tech gets faces wrong all the time, so you could end up with a totally messed up family tree. Those old photos have more value when you actually sit and talk with your aunt about them, not when a computer guesses.

lucas5877mo ago

Wait you actually think the tech gets faces wrong all the time? I used one of those apps and it found my great-grandpa in a group shot from like 1910, it was crazy accurate. The privacy thing is a real worry though, I get that. But saying it always messes up just doesn't match what I've seen.

harperschmidt6mo ago

Ever notice how we're all getting trained to trust the tech more than our own eyes? Your app worked once, but I've seen it tag my cousin as my dad and mix up people from totally different decades. The real pattern is we're handing over our family history to algorithms that learn from their mistakes using our photos, and calling it progress when it guesses right sometimes.