“From the moment we figured out how to make images come to life through film, we’ve been making porn,” declares Pornhub, as it announces a new project (titled ‘Remastured’) which sees the adult site remaster century-old porn videos.
Using artificial intelligence, Pornhub colourised 20 vintage erotic films, spanning the 1890s to the 1940s. The clips include the first ever kiss captured on film (directed, bizarrely, by light bulb inventor Thomas Edison), ankle-only stripteases, and kinky 1920s cosplay. While many of the early videos are, as Pornhub says, “laughably gentle”, the later clips resemble the porn of today. Think: classroom spanking, happy endings, and ‘unplanned’ threesomes.
In a press release, Pornhub shared details of how it successfully restored the videos despite deep-learning models being rarely trained with nude or pornographic images. “By introducing AI to Pornhub’s massive content library, it learned a naughty new trick: how to detect subtle shades of penises, nippes, and turn-of-the-century bush.”
After sharpening the footage and colourising it using deep learning, the adult site boosted each film to 60 frames per second, rescaled it to 4K resolution, and digitally remastered the imagery and audio. “To develop the machine-learning algorithm, we paired black and white images, along with the colourised version,” Pornhub continued. “Through testing, the AI was able to generalise its comparative findings and colourise images provided previously to colourising images it had never seen.”
Pornhub’s ‘Remastured’ project was created in collaboration with creative agency Officer & Gentleman and studio Espada Santacruz. You can watch the trailer for the campaign below, and find the NSFW film library here.
