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 historical life photo


Google used AI to sort millions of historical Life photos you can explore online

#artificialintelligence

Photographers for the now-defunct Life magazine produced some of the most iconic images of the 20th century and left behind an archive of around 6.5 million photos. It's an important historical artifact, but it represents a big challenge for any human who wants to catalog and explore it. That's why Google has stepped up to the plate and announced today that it's used its AI skills to create Life Tags -- a new, searchable archive of Life photographs. It's also a bit slow to load, makes easy mistakes (check the "computer" tag and you get plenty of pictures of pianos, for example), and misses many useful categories, including the photographer, date, and who appears in each picture. The latter would have required a bit of extra analysis, but Google certainly knows how to do facial recognition.