Photo-Editing Tools May Be AI’s Killer App: Catherine Thorbecke

I had high hopes for the new generation of artificial intelligence-powered photo-editing tools. I wanted to bring the dead to life.

My late grandfather had a reputation in my family for his good looks, earning him the nickname the “Okinawan James Dean.” I have just a few grainy black-and-white photos of him when he was young, and I hoped to restore these images to their full glory.

The earlier, buzzy crop of AI image tools have largely been text-to-image models, where you input a prompt like “a tabby cat in outer space” and then receive a surreal synthetic shot. But ...