I used ChatGPT to make my 100-year-old family photos look modern. I wasn't expecting it to change how I see them.

I’ve been experimenting with family photographs taken 90–110 years ago, using AI to imagine what the people might look like if the photos were taken today — modern hair, makeup, clothing, body size and, in one case, modern military uniforms and equipment. The young man in the suit, and the sergeant on the right, is my grandfather, younger in these photos than I am now. The matriarch is my great-grandmother, and my grandmother is one of the little girls. What surprised me wasn't the quality of the transformations. It was my reaction to them. Research suggests that visual cues such as black-and-white photography can make the past feel psychologically more distant. Once I removed many of those cues, these stopped looking quite so much like historical people and started looking like people I could meet today. But that creates an uncomfortable problem. Research is also showing that AI-generated or manipulated information can influence our subsequent memories. I now feel I can relate to my long-deceased relatives more easily — but I'm relating to appearances they never actually had. The connection feels genuine. Part of what created it is false. I'm curious whether anyone else has experimented with old family photographs and noticed the same effect. submitted by /u/Adventure_Buddy [link] [comments]

Prompt: Make a picture of a famous event in the history of humanity before smartphones existed, but in this picture people have smartphones and are all heads down obsessed with them
[[prompt---photo-is-from-year-write-a-random-year-here-it-was-|Prompt - 'photo is from year [Write a random year here] ], it was called 'a few seconds before happiness' ......... wtf I used the year 1822 , what was going on then?]]
I couldn't think of a movie to watch so I asked ChatGPT to make an image as if I just walked into Blockbuster in 1999

Source: r/ChatGPT | 2026-10-01

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