Microsoft's AI-powered Bing Chat can be tricked into solving anti-bot CAPTCHA tests with nothing more than simple lies and some rudimentary photo editing. Tests designed to be easy for humans to pass, but difficult for software, have long been a security feature on all kinds of websites. Over time, types of CAPTCHA – which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – have become more advanced and trickier to solve. However, although humans often struggle to complete modern CAPTCHAs successfully, the current crop of advanced AI models can solve them easily. They are therefore programmed not to, which should stop them being used for nefarious purposes.

What do we do with archival images in the time of AI image creation? As I have been writing this article, Dall-E and similar projects have become extremely popular. I had a chance to access Midjourney, a platform similar to Dall-E.

Artificial intelligence has been used to upscale the oldest film in existence, recorded in a garden in Leeds 132 years ago. Roundhay Garden Scene is a short film shot on October 14, 1888, showing four people strolling around the garden of Oakwood Grange in the Leeds suburb of Roundhay. The original black and white video, recorded by French inventor Louis Le Prince, is only 1.66 seconds long and comprises just 20 frames. But YouTuber Denis Shiryaev has posted a new version of the legendary video on his site, which is now in 4K quality at around 250 frames per second. Using a neural network to fill in the blanks and artificially generate additional frames, Shiryaev has been able to upscale the 20 original frames to give a much smoother sense of motion.

On April 14, 1906, the Miles brothers left their studio on San Francisco's Market Street, boarded a cable car, and began filming what would become an iconic short movie. Called A Trip Down Market Street, it's a fascinating documentation of life at the time: As the cable car rolls slowly along, the brothers aim their camera straight ahead, capturing women in outrageous frilly Victorian hats as they hurry across the tracks. Early automobiles swerve in front of the cable car, some of them convertibles, so we can see their drivers bouncing inside. After nearly a dozen minutes, the filmmakers arrive at the turntable in front of the Ferry Building, whose towering clock stopped at 5:12 am just four days later when a massive earthquake and consequent fire virtually obliterated San Francisco. Well over a century later, an artificial intelligence geek named Denis Shiryaev has transformed A Trip Down Market Street into something even more magical.

When it premiered in 1896, the silent short film "L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat" was a cinematic wonder. Compared to today's motion pictures, though, the quality of the black-and-white clip is downright primitive. But now, YouTuber Denis Shiryaev has found a way to show what the film might have looked like if it had been recorded using more modern technology -- by using artificial intelligence to upscale it to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. "L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat," which translates to "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat," depicts just what its title implies: a train arriving at a station. The original clip released in 1896 is jerky and grainy, and the features of the people at the station in the film are near-impossible to decipher.

Imagine the streets of New York City at the turn of the 20th century. Horse-drawn buggies share the road with brightly colored automobiles. Women, donning large bustles and matching millinery, amble beside their suited beaus as they make their way into department stores. Now you can see these historic scenes (and many more) brought to colorful life thanks to YouTuber Denis Shirayaev and his work spent restoring a short black-and-white film titled A Trip Through New York City. Also known as New York 1911, the footage documents everyday life in the Big Apple as captured by the Swedish newsreel company Svenska Biografteatern.

Denis Shiryaev is an AI wizard who has liberally applied his magic to old film--upscaling, colorizing, and otherwise modernizing scenes from Victorian England, late Tsarist Russia, and Belle Époque Paris. He trained machines to restore the earliest known motion picture, 1888's Roundhay Garden Scene and one of the most mythologized works of early cinema, the Lumière Brothers 50-second Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. Shiryaev's casual distribution of these efforts on YouTube can make us take for granted just how extraordinary they are. Such recreations would have been impossible just a decade or so ago. But we should not see these as historic restorations.

In May of 1896, Charles Moisson and Francis Doublier traveled to Moscow on behalf of the Lumière Brothers company, bearing with them the newly developed Lumière Cinématogaphe camera. Their purpose: to document the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II--the last Emperor of Russia, though no one would have known that at the time. The coronation was an extraordinary event, soon to be overshadowed by even more extraordinary events in the Revolutionary years to come. An enormous celebration followed, with gifts, bread, sausage, pretzels, beer, and a commemorative cup to revelers. The promise of these gifts led to what was later called the Khodynka Tragedy.

When the 50-second silent short film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat premiered in 1896, some theatergoers reportedly ran for safety at the sight of a projected approaching train, thinking that a real one would burst through the screen at any moment, Looney Tunes-style. A wild thought, given the blurry, low-resolution quality of the original film. Thankfully those panicky cinephile pioneers never saw the AI-enhanced upscaled version released by Denis Shiryaev, or they would have absolutely flipped their lids. Shiryaev leveraged a pair of publically available enhancement programs, DAIN and Topaz Labs' Gigapixel AI, to transform the original footage into a 4K 60FPS clip. Gigapixel AI uses a proprietary interpolation algorithm which "analyzes the image and recognizes details and structures and'completes' the image" according to Topaz Labs' website.

A developer and YouTuber named Denis Shiryaev recently used "several neural networks" to update a famous French short film from 1895 to make it appear as though it were shot on a modern phone. Called "L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat," the 50-second French short documentary shows a train arriving at Ciotat train station. The film is famous for allegedly causing theater goers at the time to panic out of fear the train would burst through the screen and crash into them. While this tale is largely dismissed as little more than legend, it's easy to imagine the impact such a visual would have had on someone who'd never seen a motion picture before. Shiryaev apparently felt the classic masterpiece needed a modern update so they employed what they refer to on Reddit as "several neural networks" to upscale the film to 4K resolution at 60 fps. The video's also had sound added, which makes it all the more eerily… normal.