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)
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.
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!
There's nothing wrong with that until people start assuming they're lossless (like Huffman encoding) which they definitely are not. Unfortunately the general public doesn't understand the difference.
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.
So, we’ll see what people say in a year.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-a-hallucination-problem-t...
Isn't it a good thing for privacy?
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.
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.
The story has to get stretched a lot to imagine a total dystopia, but its possible.
People like digital mirrors for all their benefits: lighter, more features, music and weather all on one "mirror". You can have voice chats, see how you might look with various makeup/styles/haircuts. This digital mirror gets so popular, and (undermining myself here a bit) high enough quality, that people want these new cool wall screens instead.
And you betcha, AI is of course going to be added. Take insta pics without needing to hold a phone, then apply filters all in one with your voice! Some people take dozens of photos, forgetting briefly how they look.
Now, people are used to every day seeing themselves in the digital mirror with minor touchups for how they would look if they used some sponsored makeup. They used to do it daily so it would match, but kept forgetting as it always showed the improved version (with a small icon saying, you are 40% matched to the predicted image!).
Some 20-something walking around in Chicago passes The Bean, and realizes they don't look quite the same as they did in their home mirror. They take out their phone to take a pic of themselves, which is of course synced to their mirror with the same "makeup enhancement suggestions", still warning them it doesn't match.
They put away their phone, confident in the knowledge The Bean is just a dirty and distorted mirror, which is why they don't look as good. The camera has always been trustworthy. Why doubt it today?
(again, fun story, I don't think this is likely. Just plausible for some people).
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.
https://www.destinationtips.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/P...
https://smarthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Giza_pyr...
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/view-side-slums-egyptian-pyr...
My point is that there never has been, cameras have always let you adjust the shot - including "how red the flowers are" by changing light source, film type, shadows, which contrasting other colours are nearby, etc.
With old-school photo processing--yes, in a darkroom--you could achieve unrealistic results. But it was a choice. That's not what you got when you sent your negatives to the Costco to get printed. That's akin to the results I get when I use my camera, especially when looking at jpgs straight-out-of-the-camera.
In contrast, we get modern cellphones doing incredible processing to almost arbitrarily replace content with what some algorithm feels you'll like better, whether or not it resembles reality.
I lament that it usually resembles beginner photographer work, where they've just discovered HDR tone-mapping, local contrast, global contrast, saturation, sharpening, and smoothing filters, and promptly slam every single one of them to the stops. I did it, and now I recognize it when I see it in cellphone pics my friends send me via imessage.
Been there, done that. I recognize the stigmata of saturation slammed to the stops and excessive use of HDR and local contrast.
The default is excessive editing now, probably because it helps cover up limitations of tiny sensors and small optics.
It does have higher than real contrast, but that's because images are 8-bit - if you don't try to fill the range, it's going to look low quality with banding artifacts.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/06/mkbhd-post-processing-ruining...
Larger cameras don't do that specific one, but they do care about skin in white balance and autofocus, and then photographers expose it specially in Lightroom or with flashes.
It's somewhat overtuned though.
as AI tries to infer images of people where they aren’t really present.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: sorry, you said exactly that, I’m reading too fast.
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
This is what the defense actually said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf7xCMFBv5c
And here's the expert witness the defense brought on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GhsbizmfMs
I watched the testimony, it was accurately characterized by the person you replied to, and it was a good argument for the defense to make.
That being said, one could interpret the top comment that way.
It is all faked by AI well.....
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?
So a future where reality and history are subtly tweaked to the specifications of those willing to pay…
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.
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.
And they actually look good!
No phone can deliver that, even today.
Sony is probably the worst offender here actually. The a6x00 series applies lossy (!) compression to every RAW file without any option to disable, and there's an additional noise filter on long exposures that wreaks havoc on astrophotography:
https://stephenbayphotography.com/blog/sony-raw-compression-...
http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/SonyA7S/sonystareater...
"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?"
edit: for a while anyway
The current narrative in financial places seems to be 2023 is gone but 2024 comes with a vengeance, feel safe investing, your real estate will grow in value! We're making people go back to the office so that it does! More lemmings! Less quality! More production!
Yes. I'm peak cynical after 3 years of self made economic destruction only to tell those who didn't cause it that "of course they must pay for the broken plates".
Also, everytime someone invests a lot in explaining themselves in HN, if it goes against the current thread narrative, it'll still be ignored so it's not like it's particularly worth it. HN feels more Reddit and less Slashdot of old.
Still a nice aggregator to find stuff that might peak interest.
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.
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.
In a world where any image or video can be generated, chain of custody to a real-world ground-truth will be vitally important.
This will become indispensable sooner than anyone imagines or wants it to.
Absent a chain of custody (perhaps including GPS baked into the signed image data blob), I think analog artifacts will become untrustable. Unless you can physically date them to pre-generative era!
Bonus feature: new display devices get better trained / new AI features for free
E.g. from the raw data we know the sensor, we can train a specific AI to enhance the image from the known physical properties of the CCD
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
Likewise depth fields and other potential forms of sensor augmentation.
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.
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.
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.
Or we can just recognize the lunacy of it and opt out of caring. You can't stop the flood, so you just learn to live with it. With the right view, the flood becomes unimportant.
What measures can the government implement to combat this? AI image modification is realistically possible even on consumer hardware running locally. There is no going back.
Some image formats (e.g. HEIF) already allow to store multiple images in the same file.
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.
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.
Yeah, but in the future the government will know your precise location, all day, every day, so at least you'll have an alibi.
AI isn't the thing to be worried about. People with power abusing AI is the thing to be worried about.
Sounds like pretty standard forensic science, like bite marks and fingerprints.
If any of you young folks haven't watched Ghost in the Shell, just close this tab and do that.
http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
AI will accelerate this process exponentially and just like in The Matrix, most people will eventually prefer the simulation to reality itself.
<soapbox>confabulated</soapbox>
Of course they would have perfect skin and expertly applied eye-liner and lipstick as well.
A "smart" scanner tries to compress images.
Not sure I like that future
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.
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.
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.