Restoring historic photographs is often done in an attempt to get a glimpse of the colors and details that the earliest cameras were unable to capture – but one Redditor has asked ChatGPT to restore the world’s oldest photographs, and the results are going viral.
Joseph Niepce’s “héliographie” View from the Window at Le Gras is widely believed to be the oldest surviving photograph. The Frenchman took the image around 1826 before the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, using a camera obscura and a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea. (Despite the name, the historic camera obscura isn’t a camera in the modern sense of the word; artists used camera obscuras to project a scene to trace, but they didn’t result in a photograph until the invention of light-sensitive materials to record an image from one.)
