Comment by whatisthiseven
3 years ago
Imagine this future:
Sensor quality in phones goes down, AI makes up for it because good sensors are expensive, but compute time in the cloud on Samsung owned servers is cheap. You take a picture on a crappy camera, and Samsung uses AI to "fix" everything. It knows what stop signs, roadways, busses, cars, stop lights, and more should look like, and so it just uses AI to replace all the textures.
Samsung sells what's on the image to advertisers and more with the hallucinated data. People can't tell the difference and don't know. They "just want a good looking picture". People further use AI to alter images for virtual likes on Tiktok and Insta.
This faked data, submitted by users as "real pics in real places" is further used to train AI models that all seem to think objects further away have greater detail, clarity, and cleanliness than they should.
You look at a picture of a park you took, years before, and could have sworn the flowers were more pink, and not as red. You are assured, by your friend who knows it all, that people's memories are fallible; hallucinating details, colors, objects, sizes, and more. The image, your friend assures you further? "Advanced tech captured its pure form perfectly".
And thus, everyone will demand more clarity, precision, details, and color where their eyes don't remember seeing.
Now, imagine this future:
You got a friend, spouse or someone close that has hundreds of pictures of you on their phone. Their phone has a "AI chip" that is used to finetune the recognition models and photo models with your AI library. Like Google Photos tags images of people you know, so does the model. It also helps sharpen images - you moved your head in an image and it was a bit blurry, but the model just fixed it, because like the original model had for the moon, it has hundreds of pictures of you to compensate.
One day, that person witnesses a robbery. They try and take a photo of the robber, but the algorithm determines it was you on the photo and fixes it up to apply your face. Congratulations, you are now a robber.
Good point.
For the long time digital cameras embedded in EXIF metadata about conditions on which the photo was made. Like camera model, focal length, exposure time etc
Nowadays this metadata should be extended with description of AI postprocessing operations.
> Nowadays this metadata should be extended with description of AI postprocessing operations.
Of course. But to ensure that's valid for multiple purposes we need a secure boot chain, and the infrastructure for it.
To get there we need an AI arms race. People trying to detect AI art with machine learning vs. increasing AI sophistication. Companies trying to discourage AI leaks of company secrets and reduce liability (and reduce the tragic cost of mistakes of course) vs. employees being human.
Or we could have built a responsible and reasonable government that can debate and implement that.
Maybe I'm naive. I'll take responsibility for that.
In the meantime, it's playtime for the AIs. Bring your fucking poo bags, theyre shitting everywhere (1), pack it in, pack it out.
(1) what the world didnt know, was that this was beautiful too.
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Another option could be to always include the original unprocessed picture in every photo file.
Some image formats (e.g. HEIF) already allow to store multiple images in the same file.
Or just simply embed the original data from the sensor
The far greater concern is far more mundane.
Photos taken by cell phone cameras increasingly can't be trusted as evidence of the state of something. Let's say you take a picture of a car that just hit a pedestrian and is driving away.
Pre-AI, your picture might be a bit blurry, but say, it's discernible that one of the headlights had a chunk taken out of it; it's only a few pixels, but there's obviously some damage, like a hole from a rock or a pellet gun. Police find a suspect, see the car, note damage to the headlight that looks very close, get a warrant for records from the suspect, find incriminating texts or whatnot, and boom, person goes to jail for killing someone (assuming this isn't the US, where people almost never go to jail for assault, manslaughter, or homicide with a car) because the judge or jury are shown photos from the scene, taken by detectives in the street of the person's driveway, and then from evidence techs nice and close-up.
Post-"AI" bullshit, the AI sees what looks like a car headlight, assumes the few-pixels damage is dust on the sensor/lens or noise, and "fixes" the image, removing it and turning it into a perfect-looking headlight.
Or, how about the inverse? A defense attorney can now argue that a cell phone camera photo can't be relied upon as evidence because of all the manipulation that goes on. That backpack in a photo someone takes as a mugger runs away? Maybe the phone's algorithm thought a glint of light was a logo and extrapolated it into the shape of a popular athletic brand's logo.
I’d just like them to fix the problem where license plates are completely unreadable by most consumer cameras at night. It’s almost as though they are intentionally bad. (The plate ends up as a blown out white rectangle.)
The recent kyle rittenhouse trial had an element that hinged on whether apple's current image upscaling algorithm uses AI, and hence whether what you could see in the picture was at all reliable. The court system is already aware of and capable of dealing with these eventualities.
“Aware of” does not necessarily mean “capable of dealing with”. Forensics is generally bad science, yet gets admitted into court all the time. This occurs despite many legal textbooks, papers, and court opinions highlighting the deficiencies.
The question was more general, if the iPad zooming introduced any different pixels (e.g. a purple pixel between red and blue). Or, "uncharged pickles" as the judge put it.
It doesn't even need AI to be problematic. Pinch-zoom has no business being used in the courtroom as it inherently can introduce issues. However, a fixed integer ratio blowup of the image shouldn't be problematic. (2:1 is fine. 1.9:1 inherently can't guarantee it doesn't introduce artifacts.)
Well it's not capable of dealing with it because they found apple's zoom was unreliable and it contributed to the guy getting off
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I thought it was really funny in the 1980s that people in medical imaging were really afraid to introduce image compression like JPEG because the artifacts might affect the interpretation of images but today I see article after article about neural image enhancement and it seems almost no concern that a system like that would be great at hallucinating both normal tissue and tumors.
So far as law and justice goes it is the other way around too. If it is known to be possible that cameras can hallucinate your identity, it won't be possible to use photographic proof to hold people to account.
It seems fairly easy to bake a chain of custody into your images. Sensor outputs a signed raw image, AI outputs a different signed “touched up” image. We can afford to keep both in this hypothetical future; use whichever one you want.
Once generative AI really takes off we will need some system for unambiguously proving where an image/video came from; the solution is quite obvious in this case and many have sketched it already.
The images generated by SLR and mirrorless cameras are already signed with device embedded keys during EXIF embedding. Every manufacturer sells such verification systems to law enforcement or other institutions to verify such images.
Sometimes there are exploits which extract these keys from the cameras themselves, but I don't hear them nowadays.
One of the older products: https://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/software/img_auth/index.htm
Until some PM says "why do we have both images, our data shows that 99.5% of users don't use the raw image, let's remove that feature."
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Then someone takes a photo of their TV screen. Presto, instant chain of custody for any image you want!
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"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes." [1]
If any of you young folks haven't watched Ghost in the Shell, just close this tab and do that.
[1] https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Laughing_Man
`Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex`
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I feel like with ScarJo lately you either get "big budget movie where she's phoning it in" or "small movie most people won't watch where she's a great actress. Does this fall into either of those categories?
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Obviously someone who has good enough position to take semi-clear photo and who knows you so well, that has phone full of your face, will not recognize you directly, but will be convinced that you are robber after looking at photo. At this point we can go full HN and assume that you will be convinced anyway, because judge is GPT-based bot.
This "future" is present in current Pixel lineup btw. Photos are tagged as unblured, so for now you can still safely take a selfie with your friends.
They should call the chip XeroxAI.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815
imagine you want to "scan" a document using camera app like many people do, and ai sees blurry numbers and fixes then for you. when will you notice that some numbers even that look clear are different than on original document?
Been there: https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/copier-conundrum-xerox-mac...
Would you be surprised to learn that this has been a thing for years already?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238
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AI-based image generation is surely already good enough that a single digital photo can't count as evidence alone. But your scenario doesn't make much sense to me - are you suggesting AI will have reached a point it's stored and trained on images of almost everyone's faces, to the point it could accurately/undetectably substitute a blurry face with the detailed version of an actual individual's face it happens to think is similar? I'd be far more worried about deliberate attempts to construct fake evidence - it seems inevitable that eventually we'll have technology to cheaply construct high-quality video and audio media that by current standards of evidence could incriminate almost anyone the framer wanted to.
Look similar to a celebrity? Your face gets replaced, because the number of photos of the celebrity in the corpus outweighs photos of you. And when those doctored photos end up in the corpus, weighting will be even further towards the celebrity So people who look less like the celebrity get replaced, because it is almost certainly them according to the AI. Feeding back until everyone gets replaced by a celebrity face. And then the popular celebrities faces start replacing the less well known celebrities. And we end up with true anonymity, with everyone's face being replaced by John Malkovich.
> Congratulations, you are now a robber.
Yeah, but in the future the government will know your precise location, all day, every day, so at least you'll have an alibi.
However, their omnipresent surveillance data will show that eight years, seven months, and thirteen days earlier you cut off the DA's third cousin while driving on the freeway, so the DA will conveniently forget to present this alibi as evidence.
AI isn't the thing to be worried about. People with power abusing AI is the thing to be worried about.
Whether zooming in on an image on iPad adds "extra" details was already a contentious discussion during Kyle Rittenhouse trial. The judge ultimately threw that particular piece of evidence out, as the prosecution could not prove that zooming in does not alter the image.
Now imagine that we can use a future full homomorphic encryption and train models without revealing our private data.
Obligatory throwback to the Xerox incident: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
One day, that person witnesses a robbery. They try and take a photo of the robber, but the algorithm determines it was you on the photo and fixes it up to apply your face. Congratulations, you are now a robber.
Sounds like pretty standard forensic science, like bite marks and fingerprints.
Basically this.. As "neat" as AI "improvement" is, I don't think it has any actual value, I can't come up with any use-case where I can accept it. "Make pictures look good by just hallucinating stuff" is one of the harder ones to explain, but you did it well..
Another thing, pictures for proof and documentation, maybe not when they're taken but after the fact, for historical reasons, or forensics.. We can't have every picture automatically compromised as soon as it's taken. (Yes, I know that photoshop is a thing, but that's a very deliberate action, which I believe it should be)
I think the main use case is "I'm a crummy photographer and all I want is something to remind me that I was there" and "Look at my cat. Look! Look at her!"
That's me. I'm a lousy photographer, as evidenced by all of the photos I shot back when film actually recorded what you pointed it at. My photography has been vastly improved by AI. It hasn't yet reached the point of "No, you idiot, don't take a picture of that. Go left. Left! Ya know what, I'm just gonna make something up," but it should.
I imagine there will remain a use case for people who can actually compose good shots. For the remaining 99% of us, we'll use "Send the camera on vacation and stay home; it's cheaper and produces better pictures" mode.
As a kid I was taking a photo in a tourist spot with a film camera and standard 50mm lens. An elderly local guy grabbed me by the shoulder as I framed the photo. We shared no common language and he (not so gently) pulled me over to where I should stand to get the better shot.
That would actually be a useful feature, I'm aiming the camera but based on what makes "good professional" photos, it suggests "move to the left so you frame the picture well" or "those two people should be more spread out so its not one person with two heads" etc, kindof like lane warnings on cars.
You don't need AI for taking better photos, for most people the phone just automatically taking a burst/video and picking a frame out for the still or stacking frames would be plenty. Lots of photos suck because of shit lighting. A camera intelligently stacking frames would fix a lot of people's photos.
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"I'm a crummy photographer and all I want is something to remind me that I was there"
This is fine, and I can take good shots but at the same time? I only care about this level of shot most of the time too!
But then instead of a 20MP image, which:
* takes more space, and ergo, more flash drive space
* more space to store, to backup, to send
* is made 20MP by inserting fake data
Why not have a 2MP image, which is real, and let people's end-use device "fix" it? Because all that post processing can be done when 2x or 4x the view size, too!
Because advertising.
And that's sad. We'd rather think we have a better pic, and destroy the original.
And the space thing is real. Because, that same pic gets stored in gmail with 20 people, backed up, kept in all the devices, and so on!
And the LOL of it all, is that I bet when it is uploaded to facebook... it gets downsized!
edit: in fact, my email app allows me to resize on email, so I downsize that too! Oh, those poor electrons.
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I'm a decent photographer and still use my phone for this. It's good enough, and can even skip the AI stuff if I want to. Or even better: I can keep the AI stuff in the raw and edit its impact on the final photo later.
Interestingly enough one of the reason Sonys flagships perform really badly in comparisons is because they are weak at computational photography. So even when the sensor is great it looks too real, which people don't like.
> it looks too real
Yeah I've a phone with a great camera, nature shots are great, but people don't like themselves in these photos. When pressed they talk about the defects on skin and theets and eye position... Their phone beauty filters created in their mind a fake mental image of themselves and they dissociate from their real images.
It's weird. My mom brand fidelity is because Huawei specific algorithm is part of her self.
How about using AI for sensor fusion when you have images from multiple different kinds of lenses (like most smartphones today)? I was under the impression this was the main reason why AI techniques became popular in smartphone cameras to begin with
I'm not aware of much fusion happening between different lenses (although I saw an article using that for better portrait mode bokeh), but AI is used to stack multiple images from the same sensor. You can do de-noise, HDR and other stacking stuff with clever code, but AI just makes it better.
Good for situations where you aren’t expecting or care about realism in this detail. AI hallucinations will be amazing for entertainment, especially games.
I want game content generation by AI, like for dungeon generation in an ARPG - it likely won’t be as good as hand crafted level by a developer but it should be more interesting than the current techniques where prefab pieces of a dungeon are randomly put together.
Removing noise from low lights pictures, or removing motion blur from shaky hands. Lots use cases for “ai” or computational photography.
> We can't have every picture automatically compromised as soon as it's taken.
Isn't it a good thing for privacy?
I think it's neutral.. Just as incriminating as true photos can be (at least there might be some moral highground if you're into that sorta stuff), for AI faked pictures.. You may have no choice but be incriminated by photos that lie..
I genuinely can’t recall people saying “hallucinate” with any regularity - in the context of “AI” - until people started talking about ChatGPT.
So, we’ll see what people say in a year.
The term has been around in this context since at least 2018[1], and indeed I have chat logs from 2019 talking about how mtl [machine translation] hallucinates, so no, this has been what people have been calling it for a while now. Perhaps what you're seeing is just rising awareness that this is a weakness of current-gen ML models, which is great, now even monoglots get to feel my pain :V
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-a-hallucination-problem-t...
I think it started a bit earlier - already with image generation AI like dall-e.
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I don't already fully trust the images, audio and videos I take with the phone.
I'm working close to HW and I actively use the camera/picture and videos for future reference and debugging. It's small, fits in your pocket, and the bloody thing can record at 240fps to booth!
Until you realize there's so much post-processing done on the images, video and audio you can't really trust and can't really know if you can turn it all off. The reality is that if you could, you'd realize there's no free lunch. It's a small sensor, and while we had huge improvements in sensor and small lenses, it's still a small sensor.
Did the smoothing/compression remove details? Did the multi-shot remove or add motion artifacts you wanted to see? Has noise-cancelling removed or altered frequencies? Is the high-frame rate real, interpolated, or anything inbetween depending on light just to make it look nice?
In the end, they're consumer devices. "Does it look good -> yes" is what thrums everything in this market. Expect the worst.
> Did the smoothing/compression remove details? Did the multi-shot remove or add motion artifacts you wanted to see? Has noise-cancelling removed or altered frequencies? Is the high-frame rate real, interpolated, or anything inbetween depending on light just to make it look nice?
This has been true of consumer digital cameras for 25 years. It's not new to or exclusive to smartphone cameras. It's not even exclusive to consumer cameras as professional ones costing many times more also do a bunch of image processing before anything is committed to disk.
With even an a6000 (you can get it used for about 200 bucks) you can get high quality RAW images without any postprocessing.
And they actually look good!
No phone can deliver that, even today.
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I don’t know about android, but at least with my iPhone I’m pretty sure there are apps that can capture raw sensor data. Additionally I do have the ability capture Apple ProRAW format at of the photos. I don’t actually know if these images are still processed though.
Raw format? That means without any debayering applied? That would mean every pixel has only either r, g or b information and not combined. Be aware that there exist different debayering algorithms, sometimes applied depending on the context. Also, without any correction for sensor calibration? That would mean every sensor has a different raw image for the same input. My point being, without application of algorithms, the info captured by the sensor does not really look like an image.
I can imagine there will be a lot more “ghost” pictures like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghosts/comments/11jvwy4/after_years...
as AI tries to infer images of people where they aren’t really present.
I don't know if you even need AI for this.
"You just took a picture of the Eiffel Tower. We searched our database and found 2.4 million public pictures taken from the same location and time of day. Here are 30,000 photos that are identical to yours, except better. Would you like to delete yours and use one of them instead?"
royalty free I'd assume you meant as well, or are you pitching a new SaaS model for stock photos?
There are technically not royalty free images of the Eiffel Tower at night because the lights' owners consider them copyrighted.
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This is probably one of the few good things about current meltdown and no low rates. No more silly Peletoneque startups.
edit: for a while anyway
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Haha, the idea's all yours. Let me know how it goes.
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There was a pretty neat Google project a few years back that showed time-lapse videos of buildings under construction created entirely through publicly posted images that people had happened to take at the same spot over time.
I wonder if that'll ever cause legal problems in the future. Sorry, that photo someone took where the accused was in background at a party some years ago? He was kinda blurry and those facial features have been enhanced with AI, that evidence will have to be thrown out. Or maybe the photo is of you, and you need it as an alibi..
This is actually exactly what happened during the Kyle Rittenhouse case. A lawyer for the defense tried to question video evidence because of AI being used to enhance zoomed shots.
No that was what the mainstream media lied to you about what happened in the rittenhouse case. One of several instances where one could see fake news and straight up lies be spread in real time.
What actually happened was that a police officer testified that using pinch to zoom on his iPhone he saw kyle point his rifle at the first person assaulting him. Mind you we were talking about a cluster of around 5px. The state wanted to use an iPad to show the jury using pinch to zoom that same "evidence" because using proper zooming without an unknown interpolator algorithm the defense using an expert witness showed that this was not the case. No one in that courtroom understood the difference between linear and bicubic interpolation.
The defense did not understand it either so they tried to explain to the judge that the iPad Might use AI to interpolate pixels that aren't there and that the jury should only use the properly scaled video the court provided not an ad hoc pinch to zoom version in an iPad with unknown interpolation.
Thankfully the judge told the state to fuck off with their iPad but the mainstream media used the bad explanation of the defense against kyle when the reality was that the state basically tried to fake evidence live on stream using an iPad to zoom in.
BTW I'm German so I don't have a horse in the political race but I watched the Trial on live stream and saw the fake news come out while watching
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"Good sensors are expensive"-fun-fact: Mid-range CCTV cameras often have bigger sensors (1/1.8" or 1/1.2") and much faster lenses than an iPhone 13 Pro Max (1/1.9" for the main camera). The CCTV camera package is of course far bigger though. But still kinda funny in a way.
Edit: And the lenses on these are not your granddads computar 3-8/1.0, either. Most of the CCTV footage we see just comes from old, sometimes even analog, and lowest-bidder installations.
Bruce Sterling I think had a story in that direction. A polaroid camera producer would develop photos which would've been algorithmically enhanced so that their clients consider themselves better photographers and their cameras superior. I'm regularly updated for it for the last few years when cameras are more and more their software.
Edit: fixed the author's name. Cannot find the exact story though.
This has in some ways been happening for decades. There are a few countries where the way to take a good portrait of a person is to over expose the photo, so skin tones are lighter. People bought the cameras and phones that did this by default (by accident or design in the 'portrait mode' settings). They didn't want realism.
This is just a progression of the nature of our human world - we have been replacing reality with the hyperreal for millennia, and the pace only accelerates. The map is the territory. Korzybski was right, but Baudrillard even more so.
But it won’t end there.
Eventually people won’t care much for clarity and precision, that’s boring. The real problem is that everything that can be photographed will eventually have been photographed in all kinds of ways. What people really want is just pictures that look more awesome, in ways other people haven’t seen before.
So instead, raw photos will be little more than prompts that get fed to an AI that “reimagines” the image to be wildly different, using impossible or impractical perspectives, lighting, deleted crowds, anything you can imagine, even fantasy elements like massive planets in the sky or strange critters scurrying about.
And thus, cameras will be more like having your own personal painter in your pocket, painting impressions of places you visit, making them far more interesting than you remember and delighting your followers with unique content. Worlds of pure imagination.
You can already do that with AI art generators right now. Can either generate images from scratch using prompts or enhancre existing images.
It’s in a cloud, not on your phone.
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I like the story, but I think people will notice pretty quickly as almost everyone reviews their photos right after taking them (so they can compare them with what they see in reality)
True, its just a fun story. This reddit post makes it clear, though, that while people will review the images carefully, they may still not be able to accurately determine differences.
Just take the story above with one more minor step: You snap a pic of the park, briefly glanced at it to make sure it wasn't blurry (which the AI would have fixed anyway) or had an ugly glare (it did, the AI fixed it) or worse a finger (the AI also fixed that).
You're satisfied the image was captured faithfully and you did a good job holding your plastic rectangle to capture unseen sights. You didn't look closely enough to notice all the faked details, because they were so good.
This fake moon super enhance? It already proves people will fall for it. I could easily see people not realizing AI turned the flowers in the picture more red, or the grass just a little too green, etc.
Iphones already HDR the crap out of their photos. Saturation put to max levels for that pop, colors looking only vaguely like they really did.
The contrast between what my camera raw with a stock profile puts out and what my iphone puts out is striking, and it's very clear the iphone's version of reality is optimized for Instagram and maximum color punch at the cost of looking real.
Thing is, that's what people like. So that's what we're getting.
Reality be damned.
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People will quickly see that their faces don’t look right. That’s usually the first thing they look at.
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Doubtful - they’ll just think they’ve taken a great photo because they’re a skilled photographer, and they won’t be shy about telling you so.
I guess I havent noticed that people do that for things other than selfies.
I generally just burst-mode-scan an area or scenery location and later that night, or when I add to Strava or wherever, I have an old school contact sheet (but with 60-80 images per thing) to look though. Then narrow it down to 5-10, pick the one or two I like best and discard the rest.
It's sorta like this already, in the _present_ - people post photos with filters all the time, smart phone cameras color-correct and sharpen everything with AI (not just Samsung's). It'll just become more and more commonplace
The problem is that this particular AI enhancement was not advertised as such. Also, in the linked article it was putting moon texture on ping pong balls, which seemed like overzealous application of AI. Samsung could have marketed it as "moon enhancement AI" or something like that, which would be more honest.
My worry about these features becoming commonplace is that if everyone just leave those features enabled, we would end up with many boring photos because they all look similar to each other. The current set of photo filters, even though they seem to be converging on particular looks, at least don't seem to invent as much detail as pasting a moon that's not there.
I don’t understand why “AI” is even required for any of this, other than classification. Once classified as “the moon” the GPS and time, from the phone, could be used for a lookup table to a 10 gigapixel rendering, at the correct orientation, using NASA scans. It seems like a moon AI would give much worse results.
I still argue that my Galaxy Note 8 took cleaner pictures in general than my Galaxy Note 20. Everything feels overly processed, even in "pro" mode with all processing settings turned off.
"Do you believe for your own eyes, or what I say!?"
The future is BigCorp's AI will censure your photo when you try to take picture like on tiananmen square massacre.
I want a photo, not even sharpend.
I’ve always thought this was the final outcome of all AI; a feedback loop. Same when ChatGPT starts using things ChatGPT wrote itself as references to train itself.
We already have people demanding higher definition televisions to watch AI-sharpened 4K restorations of old films whose grain and focus would annihilate any details that small worth seeing.
There's an arms race between people adding nonexistent details to old films and people manufacturing televisions with dense enough pixels to render those microscopic fictions. Then they lay a filter over it all and everything becomes smooth gradients with perfectly sharp edges.
People want this. It's already happening. There was a post on the Stable Diffusion reddit where someone ran a picture of their grandparents through it to colorize and make it "look nicer". But it made significant changes to their clothes and hallucinated some jewelry they weren't wearing, along with some subtle changes in the faces. It's not real anymore, but hey it looks nicer right?
ControlNet already fixed that, you can constrain it to change colors and nothing else.
What you're imagining is Hyperreality from Simulacra and Simulation and has been happening since the invention of the television, and later the internet.
AI will accelerate this process exponentially and just like in The Matrix, most people will eventually prefer the simulation to reality itself.
This is my exact worry with things like chat gpt polluting the scrapable internet. The feedback loop might eventually ruin whatever value the models currently have by filling them with incorrect but plentiful generated nonsense.
I was thinking of a scenario. My children are adults and browsing photos of themselves as children. They come across a picture of the family on a vacation to the beach. They dimly remember it, but the memories are fond. They notice they are holding crisp ice cold cans of Coca Cola Classic (tm). They don’t remember that part very well. Mom and dad rarely let them drink Coke. Maybe it was a special occasion. You know what, maybe it would be fun to pick up some Coke to share with their kids!
So a future where reality and history are subtly tweaked to the specifications of those willing to pay…
Google already scans your photos folder and offers enhancements, stitches together panoramas and so on. So inserting product placement is totally believable.
These scenarios were much talked about a decade back in relation to advertising on photographs on Facebook, specially with Coca Cola and other popular brands.
That would make a great Black Mirror episode... and a terrible dystopia if it becomes reality.
> Sensor quality in phones goes down, AI makes up for it
Why do you think the stock camera apps usually get better results?
How could a phone's smaller-than-a-thumbnail lens setup ever get as much light as a proper camera's?
Let's hope AI won't replace people faces with wrong ones.
https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin...
> This faked data, submitted by users as "real pics in real places" is further used to train AI models
I am begging people to find a new gotcha for AI other than "training it on data created by itself or other AI."
It's an obvious issue with obvious solutions. If it happens, it will be due to ignorance. It is not inevitable, and it shouldn't even be likely.
Why would we even need photos when we can hallucinate it all?
Can't grow cameras.
That isn't far from how iphones work now. They have mediocre cameras, people only think they are good because they throw a lot of AI image enhancement at it.
Is Apple’s AI adding hallucinated details? The last I read it’s just used to merge multiple images - up to 8 or 9 images - to form the final image. While I could see details getting lost or artifacts being added, I don’t think it can add actual “feature” details that don’t exist.
It already does some amount of features detection and targetted enhancing. Things like making this face smoother, or this sky bluer, or this grass greener, etc. From there, I wouldn't be too surprised if some details get added beyond what was strictly captured (e.g. bubbles in drinks, leaves in trees, …)
I would be more concerned with the impact on criminal system as more and more both defense and prosecution is dependent on cell phone camera data...
It is all faked by AI well.....
I wonder when the AI will hallucinate a gun into a black persons hand since the training black people often had guns? Hands moving fast are really blurry, so it has to hallucinate a lot, so it doesn't seem impossible. I could see that becoming a scandal of the century.
You (partly) joke but I do recall a recent shooting trial in which there was a lot of arguments about an "enhanced" or zoomed image and what was really in it.
If (when?) we start replacing mirrors with cameras and a screen, it’s possible we may go through life entirely without knowing what we look like.
And everybody's body image improves as they only know the idealized version of themselves, but see the real version of their meatspace acquaintances.
In the other hand, there will likely be a market for makeup mirrors that emphasize your flaws (both to help the user and to sell more product)
It's already somewhat the case with mirrors as we always see the symmetry of our real image.
> hallucinated
<soapbox>confabulated</soapbox>
The novelty of things like instagram is wearing off. I see more people not bothering to pull out their phone. It's not just wanting to compete with the photos taken by narcissist on the internet, it's also just losing interest, and knowing things you share can and will be used against you.
This will be the next step in film “restorations” too.
A combination of ai models trained on high resolution textures and objects, models of the actors, and training from every frame of the movie that cal use the textures and geometry from multiple angles and cameras to “reconstruct” lost detail.
Reminds me of that CCC talk by David Kriesel https://youtu.be/zXXmhxbQ-hk "Don't trust any scan that you didn't falsify yourself"
A "smart" scanner tries to compress images.
Oh man... I thought you were going to, "the stop signs and strip malls were how we discovered there were aliens on the Moon (and Mars) that look exactly like us!".
Of course they would have perfect skin and expertly applied eye-liner and lipstick as well.
Quite the equivalent (to me) to many kids preferring the taste of "strawberry yoghurt" compared to real strawberries, because it's sweeter and has enhanced taste. Except for photos.
Not sure I like that future
I've seen this with CGI. CGI still looks awful somehow, but people about my age think it looks cinematic, and people a decade younger think it looks incredibly realistic.
Or, you know, Samsung sells ad placements in the enhanced images to do things like turn a can of Coke into a can of Pepsi, overwrite billboards in the background, etc.
If we aren't already living in a simulation, then we've begun a feedback loop so that in the near future, we very well may be.
There is going to be a nasty feedback loop of AI being trained on its own output that will probably cause improvement to plateau.
I think the limitations are in optics and the signal processing stack, rather than the CMOS sensor. A better lens can go a long way.
I made a post about exactly this feedback loop wrt ChatGPT and it got no attention outside of one comment dismissing my point.
This is actually making me want to start using film again because it is so much harder to fake.
Or better, the AI improves your shitty snapshots so they come out great. Every shot is beautifully framed, perfect composition, correct light balance, worthy of a master photographer. You can point your camera any old way at a thing and the resulting photo will be a masterpiece.
The details don't quite correspond to reality; to get the framing right the AI inserted a tree branch where there wasn't one, or moved that pillar to the left to get the composition lined up. But who care? Gorgeous photo, right?
And the thing is, I don't think anyone would care. You'd get the odd weird comparison where two people take a photo of the same place and it looks different for each of them. And you'd lose the ability to use the collected photos of humanity to map the world properly.
I think it's fascinating. Reality is what we remember it to be. We can have a better reality easily ;)
That could be fine as long as there is either a way to turn all that off (or better a way to selectively turn parts of it off) or a separate camera app available that lets you do that.
It's the future. Something hit your self-driving hover car and left a small dent. To get your insurance to pay for fixing the dent you have to send them a photo.
Your camera AI sees the dent as messing up the composition and removes it.
Your insurance company is Google Insurance (it's the future...Google ran out of social media and content delivery ideas to try for a while and suddenly abandon so they had to branch out to find new areas to try and then abandon). Google's insurance AI won't approve the claim because the photo shows no damage, and it is Google so you can't reach a human to help.
> Reality is what we remember it to be. We can have a better reality easily ;)
Cue Paris Syndrome, because expectations will also be of a better reality. Then you go somewhere, and eat something, and experience the mess that actually exists everywhere before some AI removed it from the record.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
The evidentiary value of photography will plummet.
"future?"
Something I learned long ago is that people typically don't want the truth, in general. They want fictional lies, they crave a false reality that makes them happy. Reality in and of itself, for most, is an utter drag if they're made constantly aware of it and dwell on it. When it comes to marketing, people eat up the propoganda techniques. They want to be fed this amazing thing even if it's not really all too amazing. They love that it tickles their reward center in the process.
This of course isn't always the case. When something is really important or significant people sometimes do want to know the truth as best they can. I want to know the car I'm purchasing isn't a lemon, I want to know the home I'm buying isn't a money pit, I want the doctor to to tell me if my health is good or bad (for some, under the condition the information is actionable), and so on.
When it comes to more frivolous things, for many, build the fantasy, sell them that farm to table meal you harvested from the dew drops this morning and hand cooked with the story of your suffering to Michelin star chef and how you're saving my local community by homing puppies from the local animal shelter with profits... even if you took something frozen, slapped it in the microwave and plated it and just donate $10 a month to your local animal shelter where you visited twice to create a pool of photos to market. For many, they want and crave the fantasy.
Progress made by science and tech has, for a brief fragment of history, established techniques and made practical, in some cases, to peel away all or at least some layers of fantasy away to reality. We started to pierce into cold hard reality and separate the signal of truth, as we can best understand it, from all the noise of ignorance and fantasy.
For many fantasy lovers, snakeoil salesmen, and con men, pulling away the veil of fantasy and noise has been a threat and there's been a consistent battle to undermine those efforts. The whole emergence and perpetuation of misinformation and recent "fake news" trends are just some of the latest popular approaches. We've been seeding our knowledge and information more recently with increasing degrees of falsehoods and pure fabrications.
Now, enter "AI," especially generative flavors. The same people who wanted to undermine truth are foaming at the mouth at the current ability to produce vast amounts of noise that in some cases are almost indistinguishable from reality from current techniques we have. Not only that, fantasy lovers en masse are excited at the new level of fantasy they can be sold. They really really don't care or want the truth. They really do just want "a good looking picture", "to make the summary interesting", or just see some neat picture. They don't care how accurate it is. Now people interested in the truth are facing a deluge of technologically enabled difficult to seperate noise production.
Is what I'm looking at close to reality? How many layers of noise are there I should consider when interpreting this piece of information? In the past, the layers used to be pretty managable, they were largely physical limitations or resource limitations to falsify the data to a point that couldn't be easily discerned. These days... it's becoming increasingly difficult to determine this and more and more information in various forms are leveraging more sophisticated and believable noise production. Technology has made this affordable to the masses and there are many parties with interest in setting the clock back to a world where the best story tellers are looked at as the oracles of modern time.
People often scoff at ChatGPT that it seeds or "hallucinates" to interpolate and extrapolate gaps of knowledge and make connections but it does so in a way that people like. It projects confidence, certainty, and in many cases it gives exactly what people want. To me, it's scary because it's providing a service the majority seem to want and creating an onslaught of noise that's more costly to debunk than it is to produce.
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