I have been looking through old photographs from some photo albums that my mom curated for me and my brothers. I could have sworn that there was a photograph of an unwrapped Nintendo Entertainment System from our best Christmas ever in 1986. I do remember my parents saving for the NES and a couple of games. We played the heck out of the machine and made many trips to the video store to rent new games. The nostalgia for Nintendo is strong with me. And I am still enjoying Nintendo games like Zelda, Mario, and Metroid on the Nintendo Switch. The thing is, though, I never did find that photograph. I looked through everything that I could find and didn’t find a photo that resembled that Christmas. I found a photo of the time when we got a Snoopy Snow Cone Maker and spent the morning making snow cones. I found the Christmas where we only got scout gear: cantines, mess kits, travel toothbrushes, and knapsacks.
Then, I remembered that I have access to DALL-E 3 image generation with my ChatGPT Plus subscription. I spent the evening seeing if I could generate photographs of that Christmas morning. Some of my image generation prompts didn’t yield a great image, but over the course of an hour messing around with generating vintage photos, I realized that I was creating false memories. The sophisticated AI model was adding random details to the images, and then I was remembering them.
The first image was quite remarkable. I will share the prompt and the output.
It's 1986. My mom has an old camera with 35mm film. She took a photo of Christmas morning. We got an NES. Gift wrap was everywhere. A few Nintendo game boxes were there. She developed the film a few weeks later and put the photograph in an album, where it yellowed. Create this photograph.
Whoa. That’s pretty amazing for the first try at it. I started remembering the accessories that we got with the Nintendo. But, we didn’t get any accessories, save those hook-ups for the television. Let me try again.
It’s definitely a strange image. It is picking up on the word boxes and adding some weird elements to the photo, as you can see. But, somehow, I remember that gold tinsel on our tree. At this point, I am not sure if I really remember that detail or not, but it really feels like we had that gold tinsel wrapping our Christmas tree. My prompt doesn’t specify that it was in the living room; the AI model made a good assumption, but the detail is “made up” nonetheless. Let me get more specific.
It's 1986. My mom has an old camera with 35mm film. She took a photo of Christmas morning when we got an NES. Gift wrap was everywhere. I remember a tree with some handmade ornaments and gold tinsel. We had a huge Sears television in the living room. She developed the film a few weeks later and put the photograph in an album, where it yellowed. Create this photograph.
O.M.G. This is starting to look exactly like I remember that morning with my two brothers. Looking at the made-up photo helped me remember other details. DALL-E 3 added that the TV was on a stand and some paintings were on the wall. My dad was obsessed with Bob Ross in the 1980s, and he painted a few paintings by following along with the Bob Ross painting show on PBS. This is weird. I am using AI to generate photographs, and the AI is filling in details that I am not supplying. Each iteration is giving me certain clues and filling in my memory. I just remembered a candy dish that my mom had in the living room and also a hot water heat register.
It's 1986. My mom has an old camera with 35mm film. She took a photo of Christmas morning when we got an NES. Gift wrap was everywhere. I remember a tree with some handmade ornaments and gold tinsel. We had a huge Sears television in the living room. We had a candy dish on the coffee table and a hot water register. She developed the film a few weeks later and put the photograph in an album, where it yellowed. Create this photograph.
DALL-E 3 is now adding some extreme detail as I add more information to the prompt. It is making reasonable leaps and filling in the gaps. The strange thing is how abstract a photo is. To me, I can encapsulate an entire photograph with a feeling. But a photo has a lot of detail in it. Carpet, wallpaper, window treatments, type of coffee table, type of TV, color of the bowl, arrangement of the items, the number of subjects, color of wood, the grain of the wood, the couch, the frame on the painting, the exact colors of the painting, ….
Maybe it was a Polaroid.
This last one is a lot like what I remember. We did have a VCR. We also had a dedicated VHS tape rewinder.
Here’s what I learned tonight. Something is very weird about using AI to help recreate a memory. And meaning and feeling are strange things. They can abstract many parts of an actual photograph. As I leaf through my old photo albums, I am not storing the photographs in my memory; I am recalling the feeling that got captured Also, generating AI images of the memory added details to my own memory. At this point, I am not sure what’s real and what’s not.
Let’s go with this last one as my actual photo that I couldn’t find. I should put a copy of this photo in an album for my son to find. Will he notice that I not only got one NES, but I got a second huge one?
It's 1986. My mom has a Polaroid camera. She took a photo on Christmas morning when we got an NES. Gift wrap was everywhere. I remember a tree with some handmade ornaments and gold tinsel. On the wood paneling, there was a mountain and lake painting and family photos. We had a huge Sears television in the living room. The TV is off. We had a candy dish on the coffee table and a hot water heater register. She put the photograph in an album, where it yellowed. She wrote, in cursive, Christmas 1986 on the white part of the Polaroid photo. Create this photograph.