r/whatisit • u/Hangry-24-7 • 1d ago

New, what is it? Uncle holding something

Post image

Picture of my wife’s uncle as a boy 7 or 8 yrs old. Grew up on a farm in western NY. This picture dates back to around 1947 or 1948. What is the boy holding? Is it a toy? Or some sort of farm tool?

Update — yes this photo was enhanced using ai to take the graininess out of the original picture. My wife is giving a copy of the image to her cousin for an 80th birthday gift along with other photos.

The AI bashing on this post is unbelievable! How come nobody is bashing the fact that I used a scanner to create a jpeg of the image as opposed to creating a duplicate from a photo negative in a dark room and sending out 250 copies thru the postal service?

1.0k Upvotes

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376

u/TyrannicalTestical 1d ago

This is an AI generated image. It's likely being used as a test to see if people can tell. There have been a lot of these lately.

58

u/FunGuy8618 1d ago

Goddamn good catch. The mother's hand is all weird, and the resolution is much too clear for the age of the photograph.

18

u/TyrannicalTestical 1d ago

The boy's collar clips theought the canister, his shirt has snaps as well as buttons and his right foot ends at the ankle.

Also the mother's hand.

3

u/xGray3 22h ago

Dad's hand too. His ring finger is freakishly long.

2

u/WarmthChecker 20h ago

That kid is sitting on an invisible chair.

3

u/The-Tarman 1d ago

Her hand could have just been in motion when the photo was taken. What we are seeing on the top of the cylinder could just be the reflection of the boys collar in the shiny cylinder cap.

That said, I'm not an expert in AI images or actual photos, so I could be completely wrong. It is a very high res picture, and that did catch my eye right away. Though I didn't think AI till it was mentioned above

15

u/SchrodingersMinou 1d ago edited 1d ago

The resolution isn’t too good. Digital photography hasn’t yet caught up to the resolution of a Victorian large format negative.

ETA this photo has 100% been mangled by robots but the resolution is not an indicator of its age.

3

u/warm_rum 23h ago

In some ways, but while most smartphones are beat in ppi, older cameras suffer other problems.

1

u/SchrodingersMinou 22h ago

Well, yeah, carrying around a bunch of plate glass and a giant wooden box with a hood and a tripod is a lot less convenient than an iPhone

2

u/PXranger 16h ago

Look at the old Graflex news cameras, that were common up to when 35mm cameras took over, they used 4x5 inch film. You can enlarge a photo from one of those up to 40"x50" if you keep it at 150 dpi. those old cameras took some amazing photos.

2

u/Tyranno84 21h ago

She also looks like Ms Rachel

3

u/ThereminLiesTheRub 20h ago

The mother's hand is normal. Looks like the baby's arm & hand is between the mother's hand and her face, and there's not a lot of detail. We're so used to seeing mangled Ai hands that our brains now interpret unclear info as distorted ai.

0

u/romulusnr 22h ago

That's not really at all true about the resolution and era. You're just used to seeing poorly kept old photos. Something taken on a trip with a 120, sure; taken with a decent 35mm, this is believable.

43

u/Bubba_Jones44 19h ago

I wanna point out how I can tell it’s AI, but I don’t want the sob to learn.

11

u/Bastodermo 19h ago

For me, it’s the teeth. AI always gives people straight, white teeth.

6

u/Thirtiethone 17h ago

That roofing job is not real

0

u/Bubba_Jones44 9h ago

What do you mean? Gutters always hang a foot over the side of the roof

2

u/Shrooms_Mentality22 15h ago

And not to mention for the late 1940s, I dont think anybody was giving 2 fucks about teeth care if we're being honest

27

u/NewCarSmelt 17h ago

OP should be banned tbh

12

u/smizzlebdemented 15h ago

How about…? they didn’t have 48 mega pixel digital cameras back then?

6

u/__O_o_______ 14h ago edited 8h ago

Actually there are some astonishingly high-resolution glass plate photos because it used the full plate. It was cumbersome and expensive, not for random family photos though.

2

u/thebeastwithnoeyes 13h ago

Interestingly the glass plate photos, or even earlier way back to the daguerreotypes, were of such great quality because the in the process (complicated, messy and dangerous as it used mercury and chlorine to develop) it was the silver atoms that got oxidized and changed colour. Modern celluloid film based negatives for the emulsion use silver halide crystals which by definition are larger than atoms and through that impact the image quality.

7

u/Dangerous_Ice_1982 10h ago edited 10h ago

The fact it's supposedly a home photo from the 1940's that looks like it was taken with a modern camera, and has zero artifacts from it being a scan is a clue

Edit: OP provided the original. Notice how this is one clearly a scan of an old, low quality photo.

https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/comments/1x5fh2a/comment/pgm3yp4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

7

u/Nixionika 1d ago

Yeah. It was wierd to me that they're all unrealistically good looking, including commercial-like perfect expressions.

3

u/Fluffy-Study-659 19h ago

the grass moire/watermark

2

u/Rappy28 18h ago

Good catch. It reminds me of the creepy texture in AI "food".

4

u/Iampeyes 1d ago

Completely symmetrical and attractive faces a telltale sign

3

u/Sylfaemo 1d ago

Yeah. The giveaway for me was the 30 degree bent trees. What?

1

u/Forward-Big8697 1d ago

I see the odd pole sticking out of the ground at an angle in front of the trees, is that what youre talking about. I think youre right I just wanna see it

1

u/Sylfaemo 23h ago

Could be a pole. To me its a weird trunk.

6

u/GingerIsTheBestSpice 22h ago

Looks like the line that's attached to a telephone pole for stability. They're called "guy-lines"

3

u/DeficitDaddy 23h ago

My question is who though?

All the big companies are well aware of SYNTHid and wouldn’t be this dumb

0

u/JNAmsterdamFilms 20h ago

probably a research team from a university

1

u/ernst_wanke_road 10h ago

This is some serious conspiracy theory. You believe in chem trails too?

1

u/TyrannicalTestical 10h ago

OpenAI has admitted to using Reddit for Ai training and experimentation for years. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/16/reddit-soars-after-announcing-openai-deal-on-ai-training-models.html

0

u/Ok_Expression7723 12h ago

I immediately thought the same thing. Anyone who’s ever seen a photo from the 40’s-50s would know this is fake. It looks nothing like a real photo from that timeframe.