The growth of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) in recent years has opened up an exciting new field. When used properly and responsibly, it can be of invaluable assistance to researchers and historians looking for new ways to bring the past to life.
Our policy on A.I. is to solely employ it for purposes that complement, not substitute, rigorous scholarship. In that spirit, we’ve been experimenting with A.I. to enhance photographs of Civil War personalities within the scope of this encyclopedia. The early results, as can be seen below, are very promising.
The above portrait of George McClellan shows a nearly perfect duplication of the original down to the smallest detail. To create these, we first used ChatGPT, then uploaded it to Nightcafe to upscale the image. It was then necessary to re-add some of the finer details and grain in Photoshop. The final results are impressive.
It helps to start with a high-resolution image, but sometimes that isn’t possible. Quality images of Confederate general John B. Magruder are difficult to find. To create this image, we fed several portraits of Magruder to ChatGPT and the results were mixed. Magruder’s face and hair are beautifully rendered, but his uniform needs work, especially around the epaulets. Based on the dark color of the uniform in his portraits, it likely was blue, as these were taken either before the war or right after its outbreak.
This portrait of Virginia’s wartime governor John Letcher was another mixed result. The detail around his hair, eyes, and ear is incredible, but some of his facial features (particularly the nose and chin) don’t match. We tried several renderings of this portrait and this was the best result.
My personal favorite is this portrait of Colonel Lewis “Lew” Wallace of the 11th Indiana Infantry Regiment. It really brings the author of Ben-Hur to life.
These early examples highlight the potential of A.I. to revive old photographs. While the algorithm occasionally slips on details, its overall accuracy is impressive. By bringing Civil War portraits to life, we see these historical figures not as distant, frozen images, but as real people—alive, expressive, and human.
Spirit of '61 