[HN Gopher] Update: iPhone Camera app did not replace person's h...
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Update: iPhone Camera app did not replace person's head with a leaf
Author : agar
Score : 391 points
Date : 2021-12-31 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| ctdonath wrote:
| Sometimes a leaf is just a leaf.
| bluishgreen wrote:
| It wasn't the AI that did the Auto-filling this past day, it a
| large mass of humanity that auto-filled an incident report into a
| plausible outline of a story. I think this will happen more and
| more once AI reaches a point of higher cognition.
| matznerd wrote:
| I'm glad we got to the bottom of this. More importantly, good to
| know there is not someone running around with a leaf for a
| head...I can sleep again.
| layer8 wrote:
| Or maybe the leaf-head people forced him to post the
| "explanation" and the really AI-produced video.
| xattt wrote:
| Who are these people who cook up manufactured controversy for the
| sake of Twitter attention?
|
| The actual explanation will get lost in the discourse and leaf-
| head will live on in the minds of the impulse-minded masses.
|
| See also: Yanni/Laurel and the dress thing.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > leaf-head
|
| Well now you've just gone and given this thing a catchy name.
| That's not exactly going to help matters.
|
| #leafhead
| jhgb wrote:
| This makes some of the "informed opinions" in the recent
| discussion hilarious to read in retrospect, considering that the
| event reasoned about in those comments didn't actually happen to
| begin with.
| [deleted]
| Kranar wrote:
| Happens all the time, what's fascinating is that in the
| original discussion there are people who came to the conclusion
| that it's just a leaf that is in front of her face, either one
| that is in the process of falling down or one that was pushed
| right in place by the wind...
|
| The people who made such comments were never replied to, and
| while I can't see upvotes my suspicion given how far down you
| have to scroll to read them is that no one cared to give those
| possibilities much credibility.
| lil_dispaches wrote:
| TWTR's image and video compression is so bad I'd call it a market
| signal; they can't afford images???
| dagmx wrote:
| isn't it more likely that they're optimizing for their users?
| The goal is to have a product where people are scrolling past a
| multitude of media content quickly. Having very small versions
| of that media immediately display is the UX their users benefit
| from.
| upbeat_general wrote:
| Definitely this. I still wish they'd have a "show original"
| button or even detect when you're staying on an image/zooming
| in and download the full res then.
| liamkinne wrote:
| Question for the audience: would you say this is an example of
| Occam's razor?
| ctdonath wrote:
| Yes. In an area with lots of leaves, not unreasonable to think
| motion or parallax unexpectedly included a leaf - vs some wild
| convergence of leading edge technological bugs perfectly
| rendering content in a system which shouldn't.
| Natsu wrote:
| That said, it's hard for people to know any more after things
| like the "I am not a cat" video.
| routerl wrote:
| Yes, and therefore bad troubleshooting.
|
| Don't blame systems for bad input; garbage in, garbage out.
| OzzyB wrote:
| Yes indeed.
|
| IMO this is also a good example of engineers looking for
| complex bugs and solutions which are simply not there.
| draw_down wrote:
| ben_w wrote:
| I wouldn't. We do know, indeed boast, that AI is used to boost
| the apparent performance of consumer grade cameras and
| especially iPhones. There is that example of a photocopier
| changing numbers in the images it copies. Illusions are
| reasonably likely to be either in the human _or_ the machine
| vision systems.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I think a better question is how many people would
| independently develop the accusation if they were presented
| with the original photo without comment?
| henvic wrote:
| Definitely. I'm into photography, although I'm not by any means
| an expert, and when I first saw this news I just ignored it
| thinking there were so much going on, and the cause might be
| anything simple, it didn't really spark my curiosity.
|
| I thought maybe it was just some processing glitch, maybe it
| was computational photography messing up, maybe it was just a
| question of focus, or maybe a mix of things.
| Gupie wrote:
| The leaf turns out to be real but hasn't the guy's head behind it
| been removed? Unless the guy has such a small head its completely
| hidden!
| mdoms wrote:
| Well it was a woman and her head was not completely obscured
| and is clearly visible. Have you even seen the original image?
| Gupie wrote:
| Yes, it looked like a woman to me but I was going by the
| title of the thread "man's head".
|
| Anyways, the image I was commenting is the one clicking on
| the thread title takes you to. The head is definitely
| missing:
|
| https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476951534160257026
|
| What image do you see the head as being "clearly visible"?
| mdoms wrote:
| The one that you linked where the face is obscured and the
| head is visible...?
| Gupie wrote:
| There is a browning where the head would be, but there
| are twigs and other leafs in the brown area but no head
| that I can see.
| dTal wrote:
| Yeah I don't understand everyone going "oh, that explains it".
| That is not a photo of a leaf in front of a face. A foreground
| leaf is involved, but it's not large enough to obscure a face.
| There's also a leaf-textured halo of brown which looks like it
| was once someone's hair.
| brandon272 wrote:
| Yes, it's clearly still a photo that has been messed up by
| the phone in terms of some kind of artificial image
| replacement, smoothing and blurring. We just have slightly
| more context for where the big leaf in front of the face came
| from.
| jonas21 wrote:
| I feel like it would have saved everyone a lot of time if he had
| included the full photo in the original tweet. You can see it
| here in this thread by @sdw [1], and it's much more obvious that
| there's a tree in front with leaves hanging off it.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/sdw/status/1476957856347746305
| adamrezich wrote:
| kind of incredible how since we were primed to see it as a
| camera/software glitch, that's how it looked, but, now that you
| mention it...
| geocrasher wrote:
| Out of the hundreds of thousands of people who saw the original
| accusation, only a few will see the follow-up. It will forever be
| known that iPhones replace people's heads with leaves. This is
| how urban legends are born.
|
| This is one of the few times I'll ever feel sorry for Apple! I
| can only imagine the calls they're going to get from Karen's who
| didn't take good pictures to begin with and blame Apple for it
| because they saw an internet that one time that somebody's iPhone
| replaced a head with some leaves.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| This is not just urban legends. In Hungary there's a soft
| dictorship where Viktor Orban is controlling the mainstream
| media with lots of lies. After independent organizations go to
| court, they usually win against Orban, and the media
| organizations publish corrections, but nobody reads them.
| mc32 wrote:
| Looking at the original, yes, something leafy is in the
| foreground; however, the person's visage and locks are made
| into cubist/polygonal-like leafiness in the background.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Yeah, this seems like damage control. The AI definitely made
| a mess of that woman's face.
| [deleted]
| Digory wrote:
| Twitter should have the ability to issue apology/retraction
| tweets. They know who's seen the original.
| bluecatswim wrote:
| Their largest audience is "journalists" who wouldn't be happy
| with something like that.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| This is why I don't like Twitter.
|
| Post now, think later
| dagmx wrote:
| I think it also speaks greatly to people's paranoia about
| technology they don't fully understand.
|
| I think a lot of the HN crowd are susceptible to that because
| they know just enough to know it's possible but are not perhaps
| familiar with a given domain (I certainly know that applies to
| me).
|
| It's perhaps some spin-off of the dunning-kruger observation...
| There must be a spot on the curve where a person knows just
| enough to be freaked out by what they're seeing, but not enough
| to explain it fully. Whereas here the Halide devs know the
| domain well enough to quickly diagnose it.
| corobo wrote:
| > I think a lot of the HN crowd are susceptible to that
| because they know just enough to know it's possible
|
| Absolutely think this describes what happened
|
| I'd have probably been more skeptical myself had I not seen
| an ad earlier in the day of an Android phone removing people
| from the background of an image as easily as you'd crop it.
| Whoops!
| gwern wrote:
| It's also an example of selection effects: this dude mentions
| he's taken 44k photos. You might think that such an experienced
| photographer wouldn't be fooled by this - "what, it was just a
| leaf in the way when he was zoomed in? that's all? surely he
| wouldn't make such a mistake, and it's surely machine learning
| at fault!" - but he's only human, and that's 44k+ chances to be
| wrong, for just a single photographer, where social media will
| amplify the oddest anecdote it can find across every
| photographer in the world.
|
| It's not, "he took one photo and it came out wrong", it's,
| "humans everywhere took billions upon billions of photos and
| you only were told about the weirdest ones which fit a
| Narrative".
| blondin wrote:
| OMG, i was reading Quora today thinking exactly about what you
| wrote in the first paragraph. but in a different context.
|
| there is that false story that gathered tons of likes and
| comments, even though a buried comment debunked the whole
| thing. the worst part is that it's since been shared in many
| Quora spaces. where it is gathering more likes and comments.
|
| i stopped for a minute and wondered if the situation could have
| been prevented.
| mdoms wrote:
| > This is one of the few times I'll ever feel sorry for Apple!
|
| They're a trillion dollar company who don't give even the
| slightest little fuck about you. Stop feeling sorry for them,
| that is an insanely unhealthy way of thinking.
| OJFord wrote:
| The ( _a_ of course, but the one originally involved) responded
| 'it's a very cool lesson in focal length compression' though;
| so it seems to me from that & still from looking at the image
| that the iPhone _is_ doing something - making choices,
| engineering trade-offs - that makes this accidental edge case
| worse.
| jolux wrote:
| No, focal length and its effects on imaging is a fundamental
| aspect of how lenses work. You could reproduce this with any
| camera. More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_
| distortion_(photog...
| jolux wrote:
| This case actually seems even simpler though. There was a
| leaf in the foreground obscuring the face from the camera's
| perspective. Distortion doesn't quite enter into it.
| masklinn wrote:
| They're not talking about the obscuring itself, but the
| focal compression effect which makes it look a lot like
| the leaf is where the head should be, rather than clearly
| being in front of said head.
|
| Though the aggressive denoising and small lens probably
| doesn't help.
| jolux wrote:
| > Though the aggressive denoising and small lens probably
| doesn't help.
|
| I think it's mostly this. The photograph is incredibly
| noisy, very difficult to tell what's going on.
| OJFord wrote:
| Oh I didn't realise that was called 'compression', makes
| sense though, I was just thinking too software-y! Don't
| modern iPhones have multiple cameras for depth of field
| though, it _could_ (or intends to) do something clever to
| make it clearer couldn 't (resp. ) it?
| jolux wrote:
| The photo is already heavily denoised per the sibling
| comment -- possible they could do more but it's difficult
| when the sensor and lens are so small.
| Veen wrote:
| It's quite amusing though that so many brain cycles were wasted
| trying to figure out how ML image processing was to blame. I
| don't recall anyone in the previous thread saying: maybe
| there's a leaf between the camera and the woman's head. It
| certainly didn't occur to me that it was something so obvious.
|
| (btw, is the "Karen" reference really necessary? It's a sexist,
| racist insult that detracts from an otherwise interesting
| comment)
| iszomer wrote:
| Still interesting to see how people can rush to blame ML
| post-processing over a trivially overlooked parallax effect
| even when the former argument/theory may still potentially
| exist.
|
| > btw, is the "Karen" reference really necessary
|
| No, it wasn't necessary but at this point, what isn't
| considered a slur anymore?
| dan_pixelflow wrote:
| Genuine Q: how is it racist?
| [deleted]
| ravar wrote:
| Its racist against the group that you "can't" be racist
| against
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| It's racist against the group who can handle a bit of
| racism.
| ratsmack wrote:
| You didn't define which group that is... maybe you can
| enlighten us.
| ctdonath wrote:
| A demeaning term applied to a subcategory of whites.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Stereotyping != Racism
|
| Every culture, color, creed, nationality, and gender has
| Karens.
| tw04 wrote:
| There were a bunch of people who did say "I bet a leaf fell
| off a tree when you snapped the photo" - and the OP insisted
| that didn't happen.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Well, to be fair, he was correct. That's not what happened.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Nobody dare to insult saying that the leaves must have
| been in front of a face, just like nobody would dare to
| say to "google search doesn't work on my computer!" -
| "did you turn it on?".
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You don't see men playing the victimization card at the drop
| of a pin. It is a genuine social phenomenon worthy of
| disregard.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _You don 't see men playing the victimization card at the
| drop of a pin_
|
| I don't believe this was said jokingly, but just to be
| sure, this definitely happens all the time.
| donarb wrote:
| > is the "Karen" reference really necessary? It's a sexist,
| racist insult
|
| And also misused quite frequently. Its origin was a white
| woman who called the police on a group of black people who
| were doing nothing wrong other than being black in the wrong
| place.
| acrobatsunfish wrote:
| I don't know where you heard that, but for a long time it
| was just a fill in name for a middle aged woman with a
| short hairstyle who would usually cause issues at customer
| service in retail. The "I'd like to see your manager" and
| the Karen stereotype go way further back. It's not usually
| about race with a Karen it's about power and getting their
| way even if that's not how the rules are set up. (This
| coupon is a year expired but I want it, this TV was marked
| for a dollar so you have to sell it to me, etc.)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| you can't very well say a meme is misused, a meme is
| whatever it is.
|
| Also, central park karen is a recent addition to the long
| history of using karen as a punchline, anytime you think
| you know the origin story, check _know your meme_ first,
| you might be surprised:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/karen
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Anil Dash's interview with one of the co-founders of that
| site was interesting.
|
| https://blog.glitch.com/episode/function-episode-3
| phkahler wrote:
| So to make it meme it gets abstracted to "some self
| absorbed busybody stirring up unnecessary trouble for other
| people" or something similar. Nothing really racist or
| sexist about it at that point is there?
| ratsmack wrote:
| When we make every abstract thought racist, it weakens
| and renders the word "racist" into a casual meme, not
| unlike the name "karen".
| nerdponx wrote:
| Its origins _are_ "racist" and "sexist" in that the
| stereotype is specifically a white woman.
|
| I don't think there's anything wrong with a little
| stereotyping: the only reason it's "bad" is that actual
| bigots ruin the fun, so to speak. If anything, I feel bad
| for people named Karen.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I know exactly what the origin is (and as somebody
| commented below, it predates the incident you refer to). I
| also used it because it aptly describes people whose
| exaggerated sense of entitlement and privilege overshadows
| their desire to think critically.
|
| My daughter saw this in person, where a woman was mad at
| people at the butcher section of the grocery store, calling
| woman who bought a whole chicken an 'animal murderer'. Plot
| twist: the very same woman had chicken breasts and thighs
| in her cart, but because they were not a _whole_ chicken,
| she disassociated them from the animal they came from. I
| rest my case.
| silisili wrote:
| Incorrect. Karen was originally someone who tried to wield
| power over retail workers, and always demanded a manager.
| The white lady calling police on black people usage came
| wayyy later.
|
| Now it's been abused and overused to where I don't even
| know what it means anymore. Lady comes outside to ask
| TikTokers to quit doing burnouts in her yard and it's
| 'shutup kawen, stupid kawen LOL amirite'
| treyfitty wrote:
| No it wasn't- there was just a heavy intersection between
| middle aged women complaining and BLM + other wokeness.
| "Karen" is used correctly here and your origin story is
| completely false.
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's the race stuff that now has me laughing. The machine
| learning had a data set that had too many white people and too
| few people of other colours (leaf colours?). Somehow this was
| relevant.
| infotropy wrote:
| That or leaf people (similar to lizard people) can only be
| detected using iPhones.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Wouldn't need to obscure leaf people if we turned everyone
| into leaf people.
| pverghese wrote:
| But the iPhone has replaced her face with leaves. If you look
| at the photo. The place where her face and neck would be is
| replace with a blurred out brownness even on the parts not
| directly obstructed by the leaf.
| paganel wrote:
| For what it's worth I did send my friends this tweet with the
| rebuttal, after I had sent the original tweet a few hours ago,
| of course.
| jpxw wrote:
| I find that people on here are _extremely_ uncharitable when it
| comes to anything Apple
| [deleted]
| tshaddox wrote:
| Eh, I mean you're right that more people will hear the
| accusation than the retraction, but I think everyone already
| knows and will continue to know that iPhones have excellent
| cameras. I wouldn't be worried about the reputation of iPhone
| cameras.
| dagmx wrote:
| It's less about the reputation of the cameras but there was
| an unhealthy level of conspiracy in the original thread with
| regards to trust of digital images in general.
|
| That post was already being widely used to justify the fairly
| ludite views on image upscaling by the judge in the
| Rittenhouse trial for example.
| in3d wrote:
| The judge was absolutely right to allow the defense to make
| sure no AI upscaling is used. It has nothing to do with
| Luddite views.
| dagmx wrote:
| The judge didn't merely ask whether any such thing was
| used. He continuously pressed his own uninformed opinion
| over the evidence rather than trying to educate himself
| on the matter, especially given "expert" testimony
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/12/22778801/kyle-
| rittenhous...
|
| That's throwing his own incorrect mistrust of the
| technology into things. It wasn't based on precedent or
| founded by rational examples.
|
| He also didn't provide alternate means for video playback
| that he would trust. It's reductionist.
|
| At the very least, a competent prosecution should have
| then pulled up content in VLC and said "the source code
| for zooming is here and verifiable"
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Interpolation algorithms (such as bicubic) used for
| zooming are not "AI" anymore than a decompression
| algorithm is. There's no "training" involved; it's an
| entirely "pure" algorithm. Same input in gets the exact
| same output out.
| donarb wrote:
| There was no AI upscaling. If you enlarge an image
| between two white pixels, the inserted pixel is white,
| you will not get an interpolated black pixel.
| californical wrote:
| Original discussion for the photo:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235
| aaron695 wrote:
| zenexer wrote:
| I disagree with the conclusion.
|
| It looks like two images--one with the face obscured, one with
| the face visible--were combined. Notice that both the leaf and
| the person are sharply in focus, and there's a distinct circular,
| blurry outline around the face where a transition occurs between
| the two images.
|
| No, the leaf in the photo isn't fabricated by iOS. No, iOS didn't
| copy a leaf from elsewhere in the image to continue the pattern.
| But the conclusion, "iPhone Camera app did not replace person's
| head with a leaf" is probably incorrect: it looks to me like it
| did, in fact, replace the person's head with a leaf. It just so
| happens that the leaf was really there from the perspective of
| one lens or photo.
|
| Wasn't this documented as intended behavior on newer iPhones?
| Images from different lenses will be combined and faces replaced
| with clearer versions in some scenarios. In this particular
| instance, the "clearer" version was a leaf, as there was a leaf
| in the way.
|
| This isn't really bad thing; it's an understandable bug in a
| piece of technology that usually works amazingly well. However,
| it does mean there's room for improvement.
| karlshea wrote:
| > No, the leaf in the photo isn't fabricated by iOS. No, iOS
| didn't copy a leaf from elsewhere in the image to continue the
| pattern.
|
| Those two things are exactly what everyone was assuming
| happened. So while you're right about what is going on with the
| camera behavior, I think you're disagreeing about a completely
| separate conclusion than everyone else arrived at.
|
| > It just so happens that the leaf was really there from the
| perspective of one lens or photo.
|
| In the original thread the photographer was fairly certain
| there _weren 't_ leaves in front, which is what started all of
| this.
| draw_down wrote:
| sombremesa wrote:
| I'm amazed that such stupid stuff takes up attention, and more
| importantly, takes up _my_ attention. Thankfully it 's just a
| minute or two, but clearly I need to be more careful about what I
| click on (and let into my head...I'm sure this type of thing
| degrades bayesian priors for everyone reading it).
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Basically HN is mostly an entertainment site. Like the regular
| News, one of its primary things is to grab our attention.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I'm sure this type of thing degrades bayesian priors for
| everyone reading it
|
| What kind of thing do you mean by "this type of thing"? Why do
| you think it degrades bayesian priors?
|
| Life is, among other things, a constant quest to better
| understand the world around us. For every "real discovery"
| there is a ton of noise. Most of that noise can be easily
| discarded, some look more convincing. This particular instance
| looked more convincing.
|
| We know that modern imaging equipment is very complex. You
| shoot a picture and complicated processes happen which were
| optimised by thousands of engineers to produce a good looking
| photo. In the past we have seen that such complex pipelines can
| introduce plausible looking artefacts in a different context:
| https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
|
| This is why it could be possible that maybe something similar
| happens with the camera app. People investigated, and it turned
| out that that is not the case.
|
| For every breakthrough in our understanding there were
| thousands of perhaps and maybes. For every eureka moment, there
| is a bin full of superluminal neutrino experiments. This is
| normal and part of the process of reasoning about the world.
|
| If your thinking processes get damaged by encountering as of
| yet unexplained phenomenon then your brain is broken and you
| should ask for a refund.
| mysterypie wrote:
| Could someone give an ELI5 please? As I understand it, the
| explanation is that there was a leaf close to him that obscured
| the face. But what's he saying about parallax? Isn't the preview
| image that he would have seen on the camera display coming from
| the same lens that captures the image?
| NathanielK wrote:
| The parallax in the video is just a tool since photographs
| don't have any real depth perception like our eyes do. The
| small leaves on the foreground and the big leaves in the
| background enhance the illusion, since they're about the same
| size in screenspace. Maybe the preview showed a leaf, but it's
| close enough to skintone I doubt it stuck out to his brain on
| the little phone display.
|
| In meatspace, his eyes are at a different vantage point
| focusing on the face, while cellphone cameras try to keep
| everything visible as sharp as possible.
| daenz wrote:
| I think we bought into it because it looks plausible. In the
| original image[0], the boundary between the leaf and the person's
| face looks legitimately blended in a way that only AI auto-
| filling does. From that, it's not a leap to extrapolate that the
| leaf itself was auto-filled from the surroundings.
|
| 0.
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FH0N9HNWQAE0n9R?format=jpg&name=...
| daxuak wrote:
| The blurry plus the tiny twigs connected to those leaves still
| make my brain think it's some GAN artifacts.
| sroussey wrote:
| Conspiracy theories typically have some "plausible" core to
| stare at (much like every other illusionist).
| stefan_ wrote:
| Yeah, it has that very distinct blurry mess look that you get
| with all the AI stuff that is always conveniently skipped over.
|
| And frankly looking at the original picture again, focus is no
| excuse for that. Yes, there is a leaf, no, the AI whizbang
| still blurred it all to crap.
| post-it wrote:
| The AI whizzbang salvaged a photo that would have otherwise
| been impossible to take with a lens that small.
| snazz wrote:
| The blurriness and "oil painting effect" likely has more to
| do with aggressive noise reduction and the fact that small
| lenses usually aren't super sharp to begin with.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Original image was using digital zoom, so working at the
| limit (or beyond) what the sensor could provide. Image
| processing is just doing the best it can with very little
| input.
|
| https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476399735858683906?s=.
| ..
| zepto wrote:
| > the AI whizbang still blurred it all to crap.
|
| Maybe...
|
| Or maybe the wind was just causing the leaves to move,
| resulting in some blurring.
| nawgz wrote:
| Am I crazy? I ignored this whole debacle the first pass but
| that couldn't more clearly be a leaf connected to a branch
| jasode wrote:
| _> but that couldn't more clearly be a leaf connected to a
| branch_
|
| Yes, the leaf itself is "clear" but what threw people off was
| the blurry and dark halo _surrounding_ that leaf which looks
| like manipulation artifacts.
|
| When you use Photoshop tools like healing brush, clone/stamp
| tool, or A.I. Content Aware Fill, you often get strange
| visual artifacts like that. Here's a quick example of erasing
| a person that leaves behind blurry artifacts:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC4TsTRTHiY&t=1m42s
| nawgz wrote:
| I fail to see how the similarity of those "artifacts" would
| imply that the camera software added a leaf... and a
| branch... and connected them realistically... in the
| foreground... in place of the face it apparently "replaced"
|
| A simple application of Occam's razor could've saved a lot
| of furor
| jasode wrote:
| _> and connected them realistically... _
|
| Well, that's the crux of the issue that you don't seem to
| see. For many observers, _it does not look realistic_.
| The unnaturalness of the pixels is what makes it
| plausible for Apple software to have a bug. If it looked
| 100% realistic to everyone, _we wouldn 't be in this
| thread discussing it._
|
| E.g. Image saving algorithm with a software bug can cause
| pixels to be incorrectly "replaced" even though the
| programmers never intended it:
| https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-
| workcentres...
|
| EDIT reply to: _> , especially when the image so clearly
| depicts that._
|
| You still seem to be missing why this _discussion of AI
| error was even possible_. In this very thread, there are
| commenters who still don 't see "clear depictions" of a
| realistic foreground leaf even after being made aware of
| parallax demonstration in the update... _because the
| blurriness_ keeps hijacking the brain to make it look
| like a fake artifact. Consider that the actual person who
| took the original photo didn 't realize it was a real
| foreground leaf. (Or so he claims.)
|
| In other words, saying _" Am I crazy? I don't see why
| there's debate about the dress being blue or white when
| ... it is clearly and realistically BLUE"_ -- doesn't
| actually add to the discussion. Hey, it's great that the
| foreground leaf looks realistic to you. But your personal
| perception is not relevant _to why others perceived it as
| an artifact._
| nawgz wrote:
| I don't think you read what I wrote, so I'll say it
| again: claiming some image processing AI introduced an
| entire branch, twig, leaf construct in place of a face is
| comical, especially when the image so clearly depicts
| that.
|
| I'm much more likely to interpret this thing as anti-
| capitalist sentiment being expressed in a ridiculous
| fashion than an actual good faith argument there could be
| a bug so rare but so profound that people's faces are
| mistaken for the background and the AI's post hoc
| justification is that there is a branch and leaf there so
| it'll output that. It doesn't even make sense what is
| being claimed here, your links don't really change that
|
| Edit: I see a leaf in the foreground, and the situation
| was a highly (digitally) zoomed picture with a tree in
| the foreground. This has nothing to do with color
| perception like you imply; the fact that a bunch of
| people - whose perception was previously influenced to
| believe in AI error - don't think it shows the exact
| literal situation it correctly shows hardly makes it a
| relevant discussion
|
| Edit 2: what I see might not be relevant, but the camera
| software showed the situation correctly, and you're still
| arguing because the digital zoom produced artifacts that
| the entire branch / twig / leaf that was literally there
| might NOT have literally been there and could have been
| added by some magic unexplained AI replacement.
|
| It doesn't even make sense. There is no room for human
| perception here. If the software was rendering leaves
| instead of faces, it wouldn't be a single guy finding
| that scenario, and especially not when the argument the
| leaves didn't exist in the first place was based on
| compressed video. Comical stuff. This is literally
| conspiracy theory argumentation from you
| jasode wrote:
| _> _I_ see a leaf in the foreground,_
|
| You keep repeating "I". Again, the emphasis on "I" in
| your sentence is not relevant to the commenter right
| above you perceiving something else: _" The blurry plus
| the tiny twigs connected to those leaves still make my
| brain think it's some GAN artifacts."_
|
| The blue/white dress example was not to apply color to
| the iPhone example but a cultural reference to this
| perception debate:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=was+dress+blue+or+white
|
| Or put another way, consider :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
|
| EDIT reply to: _> This is honestly blowing my mind that
| you think theory of mind applies_
|
| Let me try to put it this way... _nawgz_ sees a clear and
| realistic leaf in the foreground. Case closed. Therefore,
| nawgz would not even submit a Twitter post or a new
| thread to HN wonder why the head is missing. And yet,
| such a thread _exists_ with (some) commenters wondering
| if the software had a glitch:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235
|
| Stepping outside of yourself and considering Theory Of
| Mind might help explain to you why such a thread exists
| with comments even though you yourself see no issue with
| the photo.
|
| EDIT2: _> There is no room for human perception here._
|
| There is room for human perception because the person who
| took the original iPhone photo and posted it on Twitter
| is a _senior iOS programmer with a degree in computer
| science_ and yet he overlooked the possibility of a real
| leaf. If we take his story at face value, his _particular
| mind and perception_ initially chose to believe that iOS
| photo software replaced the head with a leaf rather than
| consider a scenario that a tree branch in front of his
| own house occluded the walker 's head. Only when his
| friend theorized that a real leaf is in the foreground,
| he then went back outside again to notice that there's a
| low hanging branch on his tree. (That's his later video
| showing parallax demonstration.) The original
| photographer did not believe the pixels in his own photo.
| That's a human perception issue.
| nawgz wrote:
| There is a massive difference between a perception debate
| about color - infamously tricky - vs whether or not a
| leaf existed. This is honestly blowing my mind that you
| think theory of mind applies to digital zoom not being
| able to resolve details at multiple distances flawlessly.
| The AI replacing a face with a leaf is also a comically
| circumvent construct to explain those artifacts
|
| Edit: I explained how theory of mind applies - a bunch of
| anti-capitalist or anti-Apple folks who think that
| magical AI is everywhere broke this photo spectacularly.
| I don't really care why people think it's something that
| it's clearly not; people think covid vaccines are meant
| to shorten lifespans, or that climate change is a hoax,
| or that god exists.
|
| None of the justifications posted are even close to
| relevant or believable at a glance, let alone after
| seeing the reality of the thing
| nawgz wrote:
| Yes, well said, it's a human perception issue; even smart
| guys can do really dumb things, like accuse image
| processing software of adding a leaf, even though the
| leaf is shown to attach to a tree that is indeed right in
| front of this person's house.
|
| What this isn't is a software issue, or something that
| was reasonable to point to as one; after all, the
| software was exactly correct, and to an unbiased observer
| in an immediately obvious way.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Never underestimate the power of starting your root cause
| analysis with the assumption that it's pilot error! At least,
| when doing my own root cause analysis, it has saved me a lot of
| embarrassment to assume that I did something stupid and to
| rigorously rule out all possibilities before I blame someone
| else.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or really starting your root cause analysis without being open
| enough to a wide enough set of possibilities.
|
| As a fairly trivial example, years ago now I wrote a little
| article observing that a Sony ad boasting about how responsive
| their camera was (at a time when many digital cameras had a
| distinct delay) was using a rather famous wildlife photo shot
| on film. I also noticed that it wasn't quite the famous frame
| though it was still an excellent photo. Odd. Maybe something
| about rights.
|
| You probably see where this is going. Subsequently I saw other
| ads in the series which had _clearly_ mistimed versions of
| other famous photos. At which point the thing I had never
| considered clicked--to my somewhat embarrassment.
|
| (In my defense, the wildlife photo used was certainly not an
| obvious example of bad timing unless you were familiar with the
| original and even then it was subtle.)
| nvr219 wrote:
| What a rollercoaster.
| Semiapies wrote:
| I mean, I've seen dumber reactions to a leaf. I've seen dozens of
| cryptid enthusiasts argue about the nature of the bright orange
| Sasquatch that was living in the woods near a nature camera
| because of the blurred image of a falling leaf.
|
| This is pretty dumb, though.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| You mean people haven't been holding the leaning tower of Pisa
| all this time. I am shocked!
|
| I've seen some strange things from stitching photos for
| panoramic, it isn't a huge leap of logic to think some
| compression or interpolation algorithm went wrong.
|
| Glad to know it was a problem of perspective.
| jstanley wrote:
| This isn't the whole story.
|
| Just look at the picture:
| https://twitter.com/mitchcohen/status/1476351601862483968/ph...
|
| Imagine what a person's head would look like in relation to the
| size of the body. Where has the head gone? What's the nebulous
| dark stuff textured like leaves where the person's hair should
| be?
|
| I am happy that the iPhone didn't invent the leaf, but it has
| pretty obviously done something weird with it.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Are you guys bored or something?
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