[HN Gopher] Samsung "space zoom" moon shots are fake, and here i...
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Samsung "space zoom" moon shots are fake, and here is the proof
Author : petodo
Score : 794 points
Date : 2023-03-11 12:02 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| COGlory wrote:
| A gaussian blur is not a good test. It does not technically
| remove all the information from the image. As such this test
| can't distinguish between unblur or actual moon-pasting.
|
| Binning the image, or cropping it in Fourier space, would be a
| better test.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| They also downscaled it to 170x170 (Which is basically binning)
| and clipped the highlights at 216 (Which is basically Fourier
| space cropping)
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| I guess the old "seeing is believing" can be thrown out the
| window nowadays.
| mejutoco wrote:
| With photographs it was never true. This is the classical text
| on it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
| swayvil wrote:
| But it isn't seeing, right? I mean, seeing a digital image of a
| thing is totally different from seeing the actual thing.
|
| A digital image is a representation/abstraction/map kind of
| thing. And then a little bit of mental shorthand inside your
| head makes a connection and declares the thing and the
| representation-of-the-thing to be one and the same.
|
| But it isn't the same thing. Not by a million miles.
|
| It's a socially-accepted mindfuck is what it is.
| neogodless wrote:
| Pentax K3-II 300mm:
| https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010562706237038633/1...
|
| Sensor: 23.5 x 15.6mm 24MP
|
| S21 Ultra:
| https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1010562706237038633/1...
|
| Telephoto sensor: 3.3 x 4.3mm 10MP (240mm equivalent)
|
| Compare side by side: https://imgur.com/a/QwnV99D
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I have a similar photo done on S22 ultra on March 6 this year,
| and neither look like your (position of lower right mega crater
| but also the rest). So its not simple 'photoshop-into-
| predefined-nice-image'.
|
| I can clearly see that most folks here don't actually own
| discussed devices (which is fine, its US-based HN, a bastion of
| iphone and many Apple employees dwell here and uncritical
| appreciation of Apple is very evident in every single related
| thread). I've used its 10x zoom extensively over more than a
| year, it simply blows all other phones away easily for that
| kind of situation (more than those rather weak 3x zooms
| available everywhere). Family photos, wild animals, nature,
| anything you want to come closer, otherwise the scene is tiny
| dots in the center like on other phones. It works really well
| for what it is, with obvious unavoidable physical limits.
|
| Overall this phone made me put my fullframe Nikon D750 away on
| a day I bought it. I took it 'just to be sure' on vacation to
| Egypt last year, didn't touch it a single time. Most often it
| doesn't produce strictly as good images but a) they are good
| enough to be viewed on phones side by side easily, basically as
| good as fullframe there and sometimes even much better, ie
| handheld photos in the night of dark scenes, fullframe is
| utterly lost without tripod, and b) it weights 0 and takes 0
| extra space (and cost 0 instead of many thousands for modern
| camera with big sensor), since I have phone with me always
| anyway.
|
| Tried exactly the steps as author of article, couldn't
| reproduce it _a bit_ , tried various mega zooms, his various
| original photos, dark room etc. Blur remained blur, nothing
| added. I mean at this point everybody acknowledges any decent
| phone is painting quite a bit (ie iphone taking other side of
| bunny than reality, thats a fine example) and I am sure Samsung
| is doing their part as they have _the_ literal android
| flagships.
| mannykannot wrote:
| To be clear, are you saying the difference in orientation was
| introduced by the camera, or is there something more subtle
| going on here?
| neogodless wrote:
| Orientation is because photos were taken months apart.
|
| This is to get an idea of quality, with the APS-C camera
| having a much larger (26x area) sensor and better optics to
| work with.
|
| My impression is... S21 Ultra "space zoom" is, at best, a
| good party trick. But if you zoom in, the quality is still
| nearly garbage. Not an objectively "great photo of the moon."
| saiya-jin wrote:
| You realize that these photos are to be compared with
| _other phones_ and not some apsc on tripod, thats a
| ridiculous premise for everybody understanding 101 of
| photography that not even Samsung during any release was
| claiming to beat.
|
| It still shows you much more details than visible via eyes,
| so yeah its a party trick (what else would moon shot on
| phone be), but pretty darn great at that (I haven't seen so
| many people with :-O since iphone 1 release when showing
| this... then they quickly try their top iphones and xiaomis
| and end up consistently with a small white blob).
|
| There is one aspect that this phone wins at easily - it can
| take that moonshot (TBH it can be a bit sharper than yours)
| while _handheld_ , pretty consistently. Good luck trying
| that with your apsc with such a long shutter, it will
| consistently end up in just a blur. Software often beats
| raw hardware even these days.
| simoneau wrote:
| Famously, upscaled Obama:
| https://twitter.com/Chicken3gg/status/1274314622447820801
|
| I picture someone 20 years from now trying to find out what their
| parent really looked like when they were young. The obviously
| smoothed-out face filters are already giving way to AI-powered
| homogenization. And the filtering is moving deeper down the stack
| from the app to the camera itself. There will be no "original".
| abybaddi009 wrote:
| Does DxOMark penalize such falsifications?
| codetrotter wrote:
| Who is DxOMark?
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's camera testing software.
| abybaddi009 wrote:
| They are a organization that perform benchmarks. Here's a
| link: https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's also the name of the software they, and others, use.
| Though I guess the actual software has the generic name
| "Analyzer": https://corp.dxomark.com/analyzer/
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I'm surprised that some people are surprised.
| notorandit wrote:
| Maybe I can get a selfie with my S23 and get a picture of Leo
| DiCaprio!
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| Has anyone found a decent use of the 100x zoom on these phones?
| Could it be that the sheer hype it causes compensates for the
| extra cost of putting it on the phone? Like, even if nobody uses
| it it stills turn an overall profit because of the marketing
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Not sure about the current situation, but a couple years ago
| could receive tons of updoots on Reddit for posting a video how
| you zoom eg from one side of the harbour to see something on
| the other side.
| kevincox wrote:
| I'm not very convinced. It looks like they are doing some
| processing, maybe special to the moon but it looks more like some
| form of sharpening or contrast boosting than adding detail. In
| all of the examples it seems that there is information in the
| original (dark spots) that are getting boosted.
|
| It would be interesting to see this tried on a source image that
| isn't the moon. Just white with a few dark spots. Does it
| actually add in completely new craters, or just where there are
| existing smudges? Or do something like half of a moon photo and
| have white, does it add craters to the white side?
|
| The OP tried to do this by changing the contrast but I failed to
| see any craters appearing where there wasn't already dark spots
| in the source photo.
|
| It does seem strange that the OP is using an image of the moon to
| start and that they don't provide a still shot of the one where
| they modified the brightness levels to cause clipping. It doesn't
| really "drive the point home" as claimed.
|
| Of course the answer to these may be that you need something
| moon-like enough to trigger the moon optimizations. But if that
| is the answer it would be interesting to see something that comes
| right up to the threshold where it either snaps in and out of
| these optimizations or two very similar images produce widely
| different results.
| Majromax wrote:
| > In all of the examples it seems that there is information in
| the original (dark spots) that are getting boosted.
|
| That was the point of the Gaussian blur. By blurring the source
| image of the moon before taking its picture, _there was no
| information_. The Gaussian blur destroys fine detail, by
| design.
|
| The image enhancement applied by the Samsung phone is adding
| detail where there was none originally - not just detail that
| might be buried in the optics somewhere, but not there at all.
| It involves a computational model of what the target (here the
| moon) "should" look like and guesses at what it thinks are the
| blurry bits.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Gaussian blur _is_ reversible with deconvolution - however
| that is almost certainly not what is happening here, as it's
| fairly computationally expensive.
| DavidSJ wrote:
| It may not be expensive if it's being approximately done by
| a neural network that implicitly learned to do it when
| sharpening images.
| trefoiled wrote:
| this feels more like wild speculation than a plausible
| explanation
| DavidSJ wrote:
| Seems at least as likely that the neural network would
| learn a generally-applicable approximate Gaussian
| deconvolution as a specifically-applicable Moon upscale.
| kevincox wrote:
| But I don't see it adding any detail over the blur. It really
| just looks like it is boosting contrast a bit on top of the
| blur. I don't see anything like ridges or defined features
| appearing.
| dagss wrote:
| No, Gaussian blur does not "destroy" fine detail. It is still
| there it is just that the "volume" of it is turned down. You
| can put all the fine detail back again by applying the
| inverse filter.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| The most impressive thing is how dumb the Reddit comments are.
| Incorrect factual claim after incorrect factual claim.
| Confidently stated and widely upvoted.
|
| Was it always like this? Were _we, people_ always like this?
| [deleted]
| silisili wrote:
| Nearly every forum is like that. It may even be related to
| Dunning Kruger, in that people who overestimate their knowledge
| are obviously going to feel knowledgeable on more things.
|
| That said, Reddit is probably the worst place for it. I rarely
| read comments anymore there because of how 'dumb' they are.
| Worse, I feel like Reddit is like some self trained botnet at
| times. Go on any post, say 'blood is thicker than water', and
| without fail someone is going to tell you the original is
| 'blood of covenant is thicker than water of the womb.' This is
| of course incorrect, and the only place I've ever seen it
| is...Reddit. So people posting ridiculous things learning from
| people posting ridiculous things.
|
| It happens here though, too, with the main difference being
| someone will usually correct you, and not be downvoted for
| doing so...
| yread wrote:
| Have you read comments here? Confidently exclaiming that
| downscaling, gaussian blur, and taking a picture of screen
| showing that from far away can easily be restored by
| deconvolution...
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Hah! Those were some of the comments on the original Reddit
| thread I was commenting on. Glad to see that confident
| ignorance is alive here too.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| > _Confidently exclaiming that downscaling, gaussian blur,
| and taking a picture of screen showing that from far away can
| easily be restored by deconvolution..._
|
| I don't think HN (or Reddit) posters are arguing that
| deconvolution was actually being used, or that it would be
| practical to do so. Instead, they're just nitpicking about
| the technical correctness of this particular statement - "the
| (ir)reversibility of a perfect digital gaussian blur" - even
| if it doesn't affect the conclusion of the experiment.
|
| It's just the standard nerd-sniping as seen in all tech
| communities... If the debate on whether you can "reverse a
| photo of a gaussian blur taken by a camera from the monitor"
| became hot enough, eventually someone may even spend a
| weekend to code a prototype to show how it actually works
| better than most people's imagination, with the solely
| purpose to win an argument on the Internet.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Except it's _not_ actually reversible with finite
| precision, which is sufficiently implied by "digital".
| gus_massa wrote:
| But they didn't get an image that is 100% like the
| initial image. It's something in between the original
| image with high resolution and the horrible photo of a
| blurred and saturated image in a monitor.
| tonetheman wrote:
| [dead]
| petodo wrote:
| So apparently iPhone and Pixel phones are not adding non existent
| details to Moon unlike Samsung
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11onztx/uibreakpho...
| astrange wrote:
| In my experience the iPhone camera is basically incapable of
| taking moon photos at all. You just get a 100% white circle.
| f1shy wrote:
| It seems somebody from VW started working at Samsung
| DennisAleynikov wrote:
| Every few months there's a new clown on reddit that doesn't know
| anything about photography or gaussian blur and tries to expose
| smartphones for using AI based sharpening and interpolation.
|
| Oh nooooo this phones photos come out much sharper than my peanut
| brain expected!!! Fraud!!!!!!!!!!
| rbits wrote:
| He didn't just blur it, he downsized it first
|
| > I downsized it to 170x170 pixels and applied a gaussian blur,
| so that all the detail is GONE.
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| 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.
| its-summertime wrote:
| > 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?
| herval wrote:
| 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
| omoikane wrote:
| 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.
| moremetadata wrote:
| [dead]
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| 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.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| 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.
| Rexxar wrote:
| It's already somewhat the case with mirrors as we always see
| the symmetry of our real image.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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)
| sowbug wrote:
| 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?"_
| dylan604 wrote:
| royalty free I'd assume you meant as well, or are you
| pitching a new SaaS model for stock photos?
| astrange wrote:
| There are technically not royalty free images of the Eiffel
| Tower at night because the lights' owners consider them
| copyrighted.
| dylan604 wrote:
| so is pretty much every famous building you can imagine
| someone wanting to specifically photograph. Eiffel's
| little tower isn't unique in this regard. Chrysler's
| little building in New York along with pretty much every
| other famous building is as well. You just have to hope
| that your framing with these structures is not considered
| the focal point of your image.
| astrange wrote:
| Not the tower, the lights on it. The tower itself is too
| old and is now public domain.
| sowbug wrote:
| Haha, the idea's all yours. Let me know how it goes.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 'cause, yeah, what the world needs is YASIS, yet another
| stock imagery something. i'm way too outside the SV
| bubble to be affected by its reality distortion field to
| think that would be a good idea.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| 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
| dylan604 wrote:
| I find myself sometimes wondering with things like
| Peleton and Juicero, what would happen if Ron Popeil was
| born a couple decades later so he had access to the same
| VC those companies did?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Popeil
| isaacremuant wrote:
| I think they'll just use AI/GPT Hype and sell whatever
| next hypegrowth based on flimsy evidence they can.
|
| 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".
| dylan604 wrote:
| i love the self-awareness of the misplaced ire, but still
| being okay with it anyways.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Misplaced ire? Maybe not well communicated in a brief
| spell between shopping for stuff on a Saturday.
|
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| jlengrand wrote:
| 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
| thecupisblue wrote:
| 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.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| They should call the chip XeroxAI.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| _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.
| theptip wrote:
| 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.
| 7jjjjjjj wrote:
| Then someone takes a photo of their TV screen. Presto,
| instant chain of custody for any image you want!
| jfim wrote:
| 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."
| tonymillion wrote:
| Simple solution: keep the raw image and AI it on the fly
| (this is a hypothetical future remember)
|
| Bonus feature: new display devices get better trained /
| new AI features for free
| theptip wrote:
| And the answer is "spam filters and AI personal curation
| agents will drop any image without chain of custody from
| every feed that claims to be about reality".
|
| In a world where any image or video can be generated,
| chain of custody to a real-world ground-truth will be
| vitally important.
| namtab00 wrote:
| I've been saying this to myself too many times now...
|
| This will become indispensable sooner than anyone
| imagines or wants it to.
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| [dead]
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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
| zapdrive wrote:
| 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.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| "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
| joncrocks wrote:
| `Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex`
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| 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?
| MengerSponge wrote:
| I was thinking of the 1995 animated film. I haven't seen
| the 2017 ScarJo version, even though she is very pretty.
| butterknife wrote:
| It's decent!
| syrrim wrote:
| 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.
| elicksaur wrote:
| "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.
| Self-Perfection wrote:
| 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.
| jgerrish wrote:
| > 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.
| wslh wrote:
| Now imagine that we can use a future full homomorphic
| encryption and train models without revealing our private
| data.
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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.
| stubish wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| 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.
| ochoseis wrote:
| 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.
| krona wrote:
| 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Why would we even need photos when we can hallucinate it all?
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Can't grow cameras.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > hallucinated
|
| <soapbox>confabulated</soapbox>
| dusted wrote:
| 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)
| shawnz wrote:
| 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
| gabrielhidasy wrote:
| 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.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| 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.
| kuboble wrote:
| I think it started a bit earlier - already with image
| generation AI like dall-e.
| zeven7 wrote:
| Even earlier with Deep Dream
| taylorfinley wrote:
| I first recall seeing it in the context of DeepDream in
| 2015
| naniwaduni wrote:
| 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...
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > We can't have every picture automatically compromised as
| soon as it's taken.
|
| Isn't it a good thing for privacy?
| adrr wrote:
| Removing noise from low lights pictures, or removing motion
| blur from shaky hands. Lots use cases for "ai" or
| computational photography.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| 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.
| avereveard wrote:
| > 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| taffronaut wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| 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.
| mysterydip wrote:
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _" 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| This is like Huffman compression on your photos but the
| AI companies created an exabyte size dictionary and now
| you can store your photo in a few kilobytes.
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| That's already AI. Auto white balance and ISO are already
| AI too.
| montagg wrote:
| Good for situations where you aren't expecting or care about
| realism in this detail. AI hallucinations will be amazing for
| entertainment, especially games.
| worrycue wrote:
| 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.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| "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.
| [deleted]
| wakeupcall wrote:
| 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.
| charrondev wrote:
| 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.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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.
| kuschku wrote:
| 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.
| castella wrote:
| Granted, there isn't the ridiculous amount of
| postprocessing we see in phones, but even many dedicated
| cameras these days don't give you an actual _raw_ sensor
| dump in their so-called RAW files.
|
| 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/sonystarea
| ter...
| kuschku wrote:
| That's why I used the a6000 as an example. Even that is
| significantly better than what phones we're seeing today,
| where even the "RAW" is entirely artificial
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| zirgs wrote:
| You can already do that with AI art generators right now. Can
| either generate images from scratch using prompts or enhancre
| existing images.
| xwdv wrote:
| It's in a cloud, not on your phone.
| zirgs wrote:
| They managed to run it on a phone:
| https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2023/02/worlds-first-
| on-de...
| xwdv wrote:
| Ok so we just have to wait for society to get to the
| point where they care about images more than photographs.
| spion wrote:
| 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)
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| 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.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| The iPhone camera is tuned for realistic color unless
| you've left the style setting on Vibrant. I guess it
| doesn't have an "even less vibrant" style.
|
| 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.
| goosedragons wrote:
| But it seems to do weird stuff like remove shadows off
| people's faces.
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/06/mkbhd-post-processing-
| ruining...
| astrange wrote:
| Yeah, it exposes people in the foreground differently
| than the rest of the picture. That's still trying to fit
| them into 8-bit - basically it's trying to avoid the
| "black people don't activate soap dispensers" effect
| where dark skin isn't visible in a dark picture. (Also,
| if the user is only looking at a face in the picture, or
| if the face has a different lighting source than the rest
| of it, then it makes sense to calculate its exposure
| separately too.)
|
| Larger cameras don't do that specific one as much
| ("dynamic range optimizer" or HDR programs do some of
| it), but they do care about skin in white balance and
| autofocus, and then photographers care when they're
| setting up flashes.
|
| It's somewhat overtuned here though.
| runjake wrote:
| You can turn it all off in settings, if you'd like. You
| can also flip a switch and get RAWs.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The point is that people already accept unlifelike
| photos.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You've been able to make "unlifelike" photos ever since
| you could adjust the aperture, white balance, focal
| length, and choose the framing. How many times have you
| seen the Pyramids at Giza in pictures and films? How many
| of those times were framed to include the nearby city
| slums and dumped rubbish?
|
| 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...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| No one is saying otherwise. I'm sorry, I don't know what
| your point is.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Not outright saying it (and not you, your comment was
| just a place to hang another comment off) but parent
| comments in this chain saying "people already fall for
| it" about computer adjusted photos and software might
| adjust how "red the flowers are" or how "green the grass
| is", and the parent comment saying "you can turn all this
| off and get RAWs" - as if they believe there is some
| objective truth which RAWs capture and which cameras used
| to show that they now don't show because of software
| post-processing.
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Of course they do. Why would they want lifelike photos?
| To remind them of how utterly crap things actually are?
| No, people want to have that idea of what life was like.
| Sharing a lifelike image on socials would get laughed off
| the platform. enhance, Enhanced, ENHANCE get all the
| likes
| astrange wrote:
| Are you British? It doesn't look dreary and depressing
| everywhere in the world.
|
| Silicon Valley is pretty famously nice out most days.
| (Except for all those old strip malls in the way of the
| nature.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| doesn't require one to be British to be thoroughly
| unimpressed with a photo and want to enhance to improve
| on the situation to be more in agreement with one's
| imagination.
| janalsncm wrote:
| People will quickly see that their faces don't look right.
| That's usually the first thing they look at.
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| Faces are definitely harder.
|
| 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).
| dylan604 wrote:
| What that huh? People are specifically using filters to
| alter their, wait for it..faces!
| yakubin wrote:
| Instagram photos of faces already don't look right. They
| are horribly smoothed out and glowing. And people seem to
| like it.
| throwaway64643 wrote:
| But they'll forgive it if they look better than what
| they've always thought. Just a bit better, not overdone.
| There's a sweet spot.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| 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.
| Frost1x wrote:
| 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.
| wefarrell wrote:
| 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.
| cjsawyer wrote:
| 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.
| modeless wrote:
| 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?
| astrange wrote:
| ControlNet already fixed that, you can constrain it to change
| colors and nothing else.
| kurthr wrote:
| 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.
| gostsamo wrote:
| 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.
| stubish wrote:
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I made a post about exactly this feedback loop wrt ChatGPT and
| it got no attention outside of one comment dismissing my point.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Let's hope AI won't replace people faces with wrong ones.
| flangola7 wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-
| machin...
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| 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.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| 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 ;)
| tzs wrote:
| 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.
| bitcurious wrote:
| > 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
| kfrzcode wrote:
| "future?"
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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.
| azatom wrote:
| "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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| kugelblitz wrote:
| 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.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| 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..
| Grambo wrote:
| 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.
| dtx1 wrote:
| 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
| cwilkes wrote:
| The story isn't "the state tried to fake" but rather the
| defense tried to get thrown out any image taken by a non
| analog camera as AI could have added detail where there
| is none.
| dtx1 wrote:
| I was watching this live for several days. That is not
| what happened. The defense paid an expert witness to
| upscale and enhance DIGITAL FOOTAGE using court
| appropriate tools. The defense never "tried to throw out
| any image taken by a non analog camera". They themselves
| USED DIGITAL FOOTAGE for their defense. I am sorry but
| you have been lied to by the media.
|
| 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
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're objecting to things that no one in this thread has
| claimed. You're taking an argument you've had other
| places and continuing it here.
|
| 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.
| dtx1 wrote:
| It was accurate in the sense that the lawyer used the
| word ai. In context the lawyer said "Apple uses
| logarithms (sic) and AI to enhance the images. I don't
| know how that works". The word AI was used but in context
| the non-technical lawyer simply meant image enhancing
| algorithms. No one in that room actually discussed AI.
|
| That being said, one could interpret the top comment that
| way.
| [deleted]
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| All this worry about AIs framing people when people can't
| even interpret regular evidence.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| It's funny, twenty years ago I was specifically told not
| to use digital cameras but the crappy disposable film
| camera provided in case of an accident precisely because
| the digital version could be contested in court.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| 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.
| worrycue wrote:
| 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.
| ezst wrote:
| 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, ...)
| time0ut wrote:
| 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...
| zirgs wrote:
| Google already scans your photos folder and offers
| enhancements, stitches together panoramas and so on. So
| inserting product placement is totally believable.
| dellamonica wrote:
| That would make a great Black Mirror episode... and a
| terrible dystopia if it becomes reality.
| geodel wrote:
| 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.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| 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.....
| Jensson wrote:
| 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.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| 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.
| Wistar wrote:
| The evidentiary value of photography will plummet.
| marzell wrote:
| 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.
| cherioo wrote:
| Samsung is learning the best from Huawei
| https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-co...
| ljlolel wrote:
| Wasn't this obvious from Day 1
| hettygreen wrote:
| This is just make hipsters get into old point and shoot digital
| cameras... good thing I kept my Canon A540.
|
| All the subtle trickery manipulation that the smart phone's doing
| to reality is concerning. Smoothing people's faces, making their
| eyes pop, enhancing the shit out of the colours, and now plopping
| fake objects overtop of the real ones.
|
| Future concerns of this technology should range from a low-key
| disconnect from reality, to the complete inability to photograph
| certain objects or locations.
|
| Imagine dusting off a 30 year old digital camera, finding some AA
| batteries to put in it, snap a selfie and then realizing just how
| ugly we all are and how washed out the polluted world actually
| looks without a bunch of narcissism-pandering enhancements.
| [deleted]
| germinalphrase wrote:
| "Future concerns of this technology should range from a low-key
| disconnect from reality..."
|
| This phrase could cast a broadening net with each year's new
| tech.
| vel0city wrote:
| I love my Canon AE-1 but dang it's expensive to actually use.
|
| The G9x Mark II, Sony RX100, Panasonic LUMIX and similar 1"
| sensor cameras are awesome though and I don't think they've
| gotten too crazy with computational photography. I imagine some
| color processing modes might be doing a bit of work though.
| seydor wrote:
| > Smoothing people's faces, making their eyes pop, enhancing
| the shit out of the colours,
|
| Our brains do far worse stuff with our memories. Not sure how
| relevant 'high fidelity' is to people who mostly use phones for
| memories
| worrycue wrote:
| That's what photos used to be good for. They don't fudge
| stuff like our brains.
| paulcole wrote:
| What about and white photos though?
| troyvit wrote:
| Their representation was consistent for one thing. For
| another it was well known that a) the world isn't black
| and white and b) b&w is just the tech we have right now.
| For a third thing, once color came out, black and white
| was still popular because it was a known art form that
| exposed characteristics of a scene which a color
| photograph might miss. So it was fudging images in a way
| that was predictable.
|
| Compare this to AI/ML-manipulated photos that aren't
| labelled as such. In this case we no longer know if it's
| our brain fudging a picture or our camera, so we are
| starting to lose an arbiter of truth.
|
| Side-rant but it'll be weird when this makes it into
| high-end cameras that save RAW images. Will RAW still be
| "raw?" I don't know enough to say.
| worrycue wrote:
| Black and white photos are just missing information -
| specifically color. No new made up information is
| introduced.
| Retric wrote:
| I regularly take photos of text etc because I am not going to
| remember it. If a photo of a config password is AI fucked
| into showing the wrong digits, there's a real problem.
| sorenjan wrote:
| Not sure about hipsters, but it's apparently somewhat of a
| trend with young people.
|
| "The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera
|
| Young people are opting for point-and-shoots and blurry
| photos."
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/technology/digital-camera...
| javajosh wrote:
| They are realizing that these things are all toys and fashion
| so you might as well save money and just buy old stuff and
| above all _take photos_.
|
| I think it's great. It's the _exact opposite_ of the person
| who spends all their time gear shopping and never using the
| gear.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I can highly recommend older Nikon DSLRs and older AF-D or
| manual focus AI-s lenses. Youbhet full frame bodies, the
| awesome D700 for example, and a very decent set of lenses
| rivaling the holly trinary for around the same price you
| pay for a Z50 with a kit lens. Nothing wrong with a Z50, it
| is a great camera. But the old, used gear is just such
| better value IMHO. Ai-s lenses are getting more expensive
| so since a couple of years so.
|
| The remaining budget can go into going to nice places to
| shoot nice photos, and to print them nicely and large
| enough to put on your wall choice.
|
| I picked Nikon, but I assume Canon works as well.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Blatant but how is this different than all of the other "AI"
| touchups to things like faces?
| andsoitis wrote:
| Samsung adds craters to the moon. Imagine your phone added
| other features to your face.
| seydor wrote:
| MP3 was perceptually-aware lossy compression. How many people
| complain about it 20 years later
| worrycue wrote:
| The changes the AI makes are perceptually noticeable though
| when compared to source.
|
| No one complains about image or video compression either if the
| quality is good enough - because it's not perceptually
| noticeable vs uncompressed; people can do A/B testing to be
| sure.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| MP3 doesn't claim it's lossless. Samsung claims they're not
| using a moon stamp.
| aeturnum wrote:
| First - I see that you don't have any audiophile friends! Many
| sound geeks dislike the sound of compressed audio.
|
| Second - there's nothing wrong with an AI 'enhancement' option.
| It seems useful! But you should admit what you are doing and
| have an off switch. Imagine if all of the studio masters for
| the past 20 years were actually in lossy mp3 because the
| hardware switched silently?
| astrange wrote:
| > First - I see that you don't have any audiophile friends!
| Many sound geeks dislike the sound of compressed audio.
|
| Don't let them tell you this unless they can pass an ABX
| test.
| fomine3 wrote:
| They dislike the fact that playing lossy audio
| braho wrote:
| I guess there is some AI algorithm that does zoom as
| postprocessing. That AI knows the moon so it can fill in the
| blanks and compensate for a (relatively) crappy sensor.
|
| So in the future, there are either cameras that can see what
| others have seen before, and those that can truly capture new,
| true, detail (true as in, without filling it with estimations)
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| gus_massa wrote:
| Can it be just deconvolution?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution
|
| The Gaussian blur they applied is theoretically reversible in a
| continuous function and infinite precision. In a discrete
| function (like a image in the computer) and only a few dozens of
| bits it's not 100% reversible, but it can be partially undone and
| get a sharper image (that is not as sharp as the initial image).
| nikanj wrote:
| No. The author downsampled the image to 170x170 pixels and
| clipped the white levels so that details were turned to uniform
| white.
| danuker wrote:
| I guess one way to tell whether the image is processed locally
| is by disabling every connection, and seeing if the pics still
| look good.
|
| But there still might be advanced machine learning models,
| rather than simple filters.
| mavili wrote:
| So this person has been able to replicate a process that he
| thinks Samsung must've used, and this is proof? What a load of
| rubbish this article is!
|
| Not denying that Samsung or any other brand would fake things,
| but this is in no way any proof at all.
| timmaxw wrote:
| I think you misread the article. What they did was:
|
| 1. Use Photoshop to blur a photo of the moon, destroying detail
|
| 2. Use a Samsung camera to take a photo of the blurred photo of
| the moon
|
| 3. The camera somehow emits a crisp photo of the moon,
| including the detail that was destroyed in step 1
|
| It seems like the camera AI detected 'this is a photo of the
| moon', and used its knowledge of what the moon looks like to
| add the detail back in. Where else could the camera have gotten
| the detail from?
| albert_e wrote:
| Idea for further testing to prove the hypothesis beyond
| reasonable doubt:
|
| What happens if you manually add a few additional artificial
| details to your copy of the image -- like a trap street in maps.
| Does the camera slip up and show flawless moon instead?
| deely3 wrote:
| Or if you skew image a bit, or do a photo of blurred image of
| another planet, or any absolutly any other black and white
| blurred photo?
| DennisAleynikov wrote:
| It enhances everything. This reddit user doesn't know what
| modern photography on a smartphone entails.
| Diggsey wrote:
| I think they're probably right about the AI-sharpening using
| specific knowledge about the moon... However, they are wrong
| about the detail being gone in the gaussian-blurred image.
|
| If they applied a perfect digital gaussian-blur, then that _is_
| reversible (except at the edges of the image, which are black in
| this case anyway). You still lose some detail due to rounding
| errors, but not nearly as much as you might expect.
|
| A gaussian blur (and several other kinds of blur) are a
| convolution of the image with a specific blur function. A
| convolution is equivalent to simply multiplying pointwise the two
| functions in frequency space. As long as you know the blur
| function exactly, you can divide the final image by the gaussian
| function in frequency space and get the original image back
| (modulo rounding errors).
|
| It is not totally inconceivable that the AI model could have
| learned to do this deconvolution with the Gaussian blur function,
| in order to recover more detail from the image.
| Jabbles wrote:
| I would be interested to see what the best possible
| deconvolution of the blurred image looks like, if anyone has
| the setup and knowledge to try it?
| namibj wrote:
| A major problem with blur beyond rounding errors, say due to
| the optics being somewhat blurry due to manufacturing
| difficulties and tradeoffs for weakening assembly tolerance
| requirements (like wanting rotationally symmetrical optical
| surfaces, despite a rectangular shaped actively-used image
| focal plane (e.g. CMOS photodiode array), and potential for
| specializing the design to evenly light up _just_ that
| rectangle), is that the photon shot noise has a standard
| deviation equal to the square root of the photon count.
|
| A smartphone sensor pixel has space for some low 4 digits
| number of electrons (created with some probability from
| photons, but that stochastic effect doesn't matter for anything
| a normal user would photograph) and typically should have a
| fixed 2~10 electron standard deviation from the analog-to-
| digital-converter (well, mostly the amplifiers involved in that
| process).
|
| So if your pixel is fully exposed at a high 10000 electrons,
| and you [?] that, you have 100 electrons stddev from shot noise
| plus worst case 10 electrons stddev from the readout
| amplifier/ADC. If you have a dark pixel that only got 100x less
| light to only have accumulated 100 electrons, [?] of that gives
| 10 electrons stddev of shot noise plus the same 10 electrons
| stddev readout amplifier/ADC.
|
| The problem is that while you have an SNR of 5 with the dark
| pixel, when trying to deconvolve it out of a nearby bright
| pixel, even perfectly with no rounding errors (1 electron = 1
| ulp/lsb in a linear raw format), you now have 100/110 = 10/11
| [?] 0.91. That's far worse than the 5 from before. This gets
| worse if your ADC has only the 2 electrons stddev instead of
| the 10 (about 2x worse here).
|
| That's the reason why deconvolution after the photon detector
| is a band aid that you only begrudgingly tend to accept.
|
| The trade-off just requires massively increased aperture/light
| gathering, likely negating your savings on optics.
| nikanj wrote:
| No amount of math is going to save the original detail from
| getting downsampled to 170x170
| top_sigrid wrote:
| While the information might be recoverable, the information is
| not seen by the camera sensor. Hence I think the argument in
| the post stands. Some AI model/overlay magic is happening,
| pretending to display information the sensor simply did not
| receive.
| [deleted]
| raincole wrote:
| > However, they are wrong about the detail being gone in the
| gaussian-blurred image.
|
| Well yes, but he also downsampled the image to 170x170. As far
| as I know, downsampled information is strictly lost, and
| unrecoverable without an external information source (like an
| AI model trained with pictures of moon).
| drhagen wrote:
| I'm too lazy to downscale it myself, so here's a 180x180
| picture of the moon from WP [1]. This looks about the same as
| the Samsung result [2]. They are not getting the original
| detail, but they are getting the detail they should expect if
| Samsung simply deconvolved the blurred image.
|
| [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b
| /Lu...
|
| [2] https://imgur.com/bXJOZgI
| Cyykratahk wrote:
| But the AI should not have learned to apply a Gaussian
| deconvolution kernel. If anything it should be applying a lens-
| based bokeh kernel instead. A true lens blur does not behave
| like a Gaussian blur.
| gus_massa wrote:
| They don't get an exact reconstruction of the original image.
| What happens if you apply Gaussian blur and then try to undo
| it with a bokeh kernel?
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| A mess.
| gus_massa wrote:
| A mess like in the OP https://imgur.com/ULVX933 or
| something worse?
|
| (Just in case, original image https://imgur.com/PIAjVKp )
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| You certainly wouldn't be able to recover any detail this
| way (in fact, deconvoluting Gauss after taking a photo of
| the picture displayed on a computer screen won't give you
| any kind of sensible results either - try it yourself).
| godelski wrote:
| > If they applied a perfect digital gaussian-blur, then that is
| reversible
|
| Actually any noise distribution is frequently reversible if you
| know the parameters and number of steps. This is in fact how
| diffusion models work (there's even work of Normalizing Flows
| removing realistic camera noise). It is just almost impossible
| to figure this out since there are many equivalent looking
| ways. But we need to be clear that there is a difference
| between reversibility and invertibility. A invertible process
| is bijective, or perfectly recreates the original setting. A
| reversible process can just work in both directions and isn't
| guaranteed to be invertible. (Invertible means reversible but
| reversible doesn't mean invertible)[0]
|
| I bring this up because even more complicated versions of
| bluring could be argued as not "faked" but rather "enhanced." A
| better way to test Samsung faking the data is to mask out
| regions. If the phone fills in the gaps then it is definitely
| generating new data. This can still be fine if the regions are
| small, unless we also want to call bilinear interpolation
| "faked" but I don't think most people would. This is why it
| gets quite difficult to actually prove Samsung is faking the
| image. I don't have a Samsung phone to test this though.
|
| So basically I'm with you, and even a slightly stronger version
| of this
|
| > It is not totally inconceivable that the AI model could have
| learned to do this deconvolution with the Gaussian blur
| function, in order to recover more detail from the image.
|
| Edit: After reading other comments I wanted to bring some
| things up.
|
| - The down scaling is reversible, but not invertible. We can
| upscale, reversing the process. But yes, there is information
| lost. But some data can still be approximated and/or inferred.
|
| - The clipping experiment isn't that good. Honestly, looking at
| the two my brain fills in the pieces and they look reasonable
| to me too. Clipping the brightness isn't enough, especially
| since it is a small portion of the actual distribution. I did
| this on both the full image and small image and both are
| difficult to distinguish by eye from the non-clipped. Clipping
| below 200 seems to better wash out the bottom of the moon and
| remove that detail. 180 seems better though tbh.
| [deleted]
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| > As long as you know the blur function exactly, you can divide
| the final image by the gaussian function in frequency space and
| get the original image back (modulo rounding errors).
|
| Those rounding errors are very important though. The Gaussian
| function goes to zero very quickly and dividing by small
| numbers is not a good idea.
|
| If your deconvolving a noise free version of the original that
| also doesn't have any saturated pixels (in the black or white
| direction) then you can get the pretty close to the original
| back. I don't think this applies here because the OP is taking
| a picture of a screen that shows the blurred version, so we've
| got all kind of error sources. I think the OP is right: the
| camera is subbing in a known picture of the moon.
|
| It would be interesting to see what happens with anisotropic
| blur for example, or with a picture of the moon with added fake
| details (words maybe?) and then blurred.
| [deleted]
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| This is incorrect. The frequency domain inverse of the Gaussian
| ends up yielding a division by zero. There is no inverse for
| the Gaussian.
| godelski wrote:
| They didn't claim invertible. The de-gaussinization is a
| reversible process albeit not invertible. I actually say more
| in this comment
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35111998
| colanderman wrote:
| That is mathematically true but not practically. Though
| indeed the Gaussian kernel has lots of zeros [1], in
| actuality, (a) the zeros themselves are at points, not
| regions, and therefore of little consequence, and (b) in
| practice the noise generated from reamplifying frequencies
| _near_ these zeros can be minimized via techniques such as
| Wiener deconvolution [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_function#Gaussian_wi
| ndo...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_deconvolution
| geor9e wrote:
| >If they applied a perfect digital gaussian-blur, then that is
| reversible
|
| Not true. Deconvolution is a statistical estimate. Think about
| it. When you blur, colors get combined with their neighbors.
| Statistically this moves toward a middle grey. You're
| compressing the gamut of colors towards the middle, and thus
| losing information. Look at an extreme case - 2 pixels of mid-
| grey. It can be deconvoluted to itself, to a light and dark
| grey, or to one black and one white. All those deconvolutions
| are equally valid. There's no 1-to-1 inverse to a convolution.
| If you do a gaussian blur on a real photo and then a
| deconvolution algorithm you'll get a different image, with an
| arbitrary tuning, but probably biased towards max contrast in
| details and light noise, since that what people expect from
| such tools and what most real photos have. But, just like A.I.
| enhanced images, it's using statistics when filling in the
| missing data.
| fsh wrote:
| This is wrong. The blurred image contains only intensity
| information, but reversing the convolution in frequency space
| would require phase information as well. A simple Gaussian blur
| is _not_ reversible, even in principle.
| colanderman wrote:
| There is no "phase information" in the spatial domain.
| "Phase" is literally, where the pixels are on the screen.
|
| Rather, reversing blur of any type is limited (a) by spatial
| decimation (a.k.a. down sampling, which is performed in the
| article), and (b) by noise/quantization floor, below which
| high frequency content has been pushed.
| fsh wrote:
| The _input_ of the DFT is real, but the _output_ is
| complex. Filtering in the Fourier domain means that the DFT
| of the image is multiplied with that of the filter. The
| resulting complex array is than converted into an output
| image by taking the magnitude. This destroys the phase
| information and makes the operation irreversible.
|
| Another point of view is that there are infinitely many
| images that will produce the same result after blurring.
| Obviously, this makes the operation irreversible.
| colanderman wrote:
| > The resulting complex array is than converted into an
| output image by taking the magnitude.
|
| No, it's emphatically _not_. Perhaps you are thinking of
| displaying a spectrogram.
|
| To produce an image from frequency-domain data, inverse
| DFT must be applied. Since (as @nyanpasu64 points out),
| the DFT of a real-valued image or kernel is conjugate-
| symmetric (and vice-versa), the result is again real-
| valued without loss of information. The phase information
| is not lost. If it were, the image would be a jumbled
| mess.
|
| (Not that DFT+inverse DFT is necessary for Gaussian blur
| anyway -- you simply convolve with a truncated Gaussian
| kernel.)
|
| > Another point of view is that there are infinitely many
| images that will produce the same result after blurring.
|
| No, this is not true. I don't know why you think it is.
| This is only true of a brick wall filter, which Gaussian
| filter is not [1].
|
| The SNR of high-spatial-frequency components is reduced
| for sure, which can lead to irrevocable information loss.
| But this is nothing to do with phase.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_function#Gaussia
| n_windo...
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Both an image and a convolution have a conjugate-
| symmetric DFT, and the phase of each complex bin encodes
| spatial information, and there's no "taking the
| magnitude" involved anywhere when turning a spectrum back
| into an image (only complex cancellation).
| Terretta wrote:
| Author tested for this by doing the experiment again with
| detail clipped into highlights, completely gone, model detail
| was added back.
|
| > _To further drive home my point, I blurred the moon even
| further and clipped the highlights, which means the area which
| is above 216 in brightness gets clipped to pure white - there
| 's no detail there, just a white blob -
| https://imgur.com/9XMgt06_
|
| > _I zoomed in on the monitor showing that image and, guess
| what, again you see slapped on detail, even in the parts I
| explicitly clipped (made completely 100%
| white):https://imgur.com/9kichAp_
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I watched the video and in this case the "recovered" detail
| is clearly natural to me. The original case does look like
| some kind of moon-specific processing, but this one with
| clipped highlights seems natural and can be achieved using
| classical CV.
| Groxx wrote:
| While I think this is a _great_ test, I 'm not really sure
| what that second picture is supposed to be showing. Kinda
| seems like they used the wrong picture entirely.
| Izkata wrote:
| Second image is a video, shows them zooming in and how it
| switches from the blob to detail
| Groxx wrote:
| Ah! Thank you! I wasn't getting the controls for some
| reason.
|
| Given how small the pure-white areas are, tbh I'm not
| sure I'd consider that as having "added detail". It has
| _texture_ that matches the rest of the moon, but that 's
| about as far as I'd be comfortable claiming... and that
| seems fine, basically an un-blurring artifact like you
| see in tons of sharpening algorithms.
|
| I do think this "clip the data, look for impossible
| details" is a very good experiment and one that seems
| likely to bear fruit, since it's something cameras
| "expect" to encounter. I just don't think this instance
| is all that convincing.
|
| ---
|
| And to be clear, I _absolutely_ believe Samsung is faking
| it, and hiding behind marketing jargon. The outputs are
| pretty ridiculous. They may not be "photoshopping on a
| texture", but training an AI on moon pictures and asking
| it to add those details to images is... well, the same
| thing Photoshop has features for. It makes no difference
| - it's not maximizing the data available, it's injecting
| external data, and they deserve to be slammed for that.
| tgv wrote:
| Is it Gaussian blur, though, or some other invertible kernel?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| You're forgetting it was also downscaled to 170x170, and later
| had the highlights clipped. Both are irreversible.
| comboy wrote:
| I wondered that too. I think he should have altered the moon
| image a bit before applying the filter.
| Terretta wrote:
| Author did, did it again intentionally CLIPPING detail so
| there was none, not just blurred gone. It put detail.
| comboy wrote:
| I seemed to have read the whole post but didn't notice
| anything about it, my bad.
| poniko wrote:
| I tinkered with the idea to let a app use your personal gallery
| as training data and create a "barney camera"(himym) where 100%
| of photos of you and your friends would always be perfect, it
| would be impossible to capture a bad photo.. same here, its the
| moon just perfect .. who cares its not like it changes ..
| teo_zero wrote:
| Does it enhance the moon only, or the Taj Mahal, Grand Canyon and
| Montblanc, too?
|
| How long until your phone detects the subject based on geo
| localization and replaces your shot with a stock image of the
| subject from an immense database of selected, professional-
| looking pictures?
| fisian wrote:
| Someone made a camera that has this "feature":
| https://philippschmitt.com/archive/2018/work/camera-restrict...
| t344344 wrote:
| Huawei phones did this a few years back.
|
| You can get sued if you publish someones real pictures without
| makeup and photo-shopping. AI beatified pictures have the same
| criteria.
| justinclift wrote:
| > You can get sued if you publish someones real pictures
| without makeup and photo-shopping.
|
| That sounds really weird. Any further info?
| Aeolun wrote:
| I am not convinced. Looks like a bog standard sharpening
| alghorithm to me.
|
| I've taken pictures of the moon at 100x optical zoom, and if
| Samsung is really faking this they're doing a truly awful job of
| it.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Oh but the plot thickens. Was this post itself a result of AI
| plagiarizing/paraphrasing of another older post?
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...
| andsoitis wrote:
| tl;dr: AI is used to add detail that doesn't exist to your
| photos.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I think it's even more damning seeing this happen on the phone
| near the bottom of the article. There's no way a phone camera
| sensor can capture all those raw values of the moon with 45X
| digital zoom with a phone telephoto lens (you can only see so far
| with 5 mm of packaging). From a digital sensor point of view, it
| probably sees a white blob and fires up the AI when it has a
| contrast and lighting similar to the moon
| duskwuff wrote:
| What would be even funnier (and more obvious, once people
| caught on) would be if the phone used its orientation sensors
| to only activate "Moon Mode" when pointed at the approximate
| current location of the moon. :)
| CharlesW wrote:
| This issue has been known for a few years. Here's a more thorough
| analysis from January 2021:
|
| _" Is the Galaxy S21 Ultra using AI to fake detailed Moon
| photos?"_: https://www.inverse.com/input/reviews/is-samsung-
| galaxy-s21-...
|
| Note that the author decides that Samsung's photos are "not
| fake", in the sense that they were not doctored after being taken
| with the phone. However, the article decisively proves that
| they're being heavily doctored in-camera.
|
| Another test would be to shoot RAW + JPEG if the camera supports
| it. A true RAW image would reveal what the sensor is actually
| capturing.
| can16358p wrote:
| Depends. For example Apple can save ProRaw format which DOES
| include the postprocess magickery, but uncompressed and having
| more detail for post.
|
| BUT, it also provides apps with true RAW, which is true (or
| very close to true) raw.
|
| Two different definitions of "raw" is apparently possible even
| on the same device.
| andsoitis wrote:
| _Samsung Galaxy Phone - now hallucinating a more beautiful
| reality_ (tm)
| furyofantares wrote:
| I took a max-(non-optical)-zoom photo of a rabbit in my yard a
| while back using an iphone, then further enlarged the result to
| see how it did - in the details it looked like an impressionistic
| painting of a rabbit, facing the camera and looking left. The
| actual rabbit was looking away from the camera and to the right.
| The eye and face were not visible.
|
| https://i.ibb.co/Kz7Sbm2/8-EA85-C12-5-B11-44-D8-9566-461-C98...
| kuschku wrote:
| Look at pictures on social media in recent months, pretty much
| every single image looks like this. If you zoom in, they're all
| inaccurate impressionist paintings. They only look good at
| original size.
|
| It's absolutely painful and encourages me yet again to use my
| mirrorless camera even more.
| sushisource wrote:
| At this point I wish we had legislation requiring a "turn off
| AI bullshit" option for any camera. Every time I've taken a
| picture of myself using the camera app built-in to WhatsApp,
| it blurs the shit out of my face in an attempt to hide
| blemishes or whatever, and (in a weird sort of reverse-
| vanity) it really annoys me that it gives the impression I
| care about looking un-blemished, which I do not. AFAICT,
| there is no way to turn this off.
| chroma wrote:
| Is there any camera that doesn't let you disable advanced
| image processing algorithms? It'd have to be some sort of
| locked-down phone, because there are many camera apps for
| both Android and iPhone. Also the default camera apps do
| allow you to disable these features. Nobody is forcing
| anyone to use fancy image processing algorithms. Having the
| government intervene for something like this seems like
| overkill.
| astrange wrote:
| Most any image filtering will soften faces even if that's
| not the point (either by accidentally removing noise or
| because image stacking doesn't work if there's noise.) If
| you want it to look "natural" you actually have to make an
| effort to add the noise back later.
| calin2k wrote:
| we need "raw" camera apps for our smartfones. like oraganic food,
| "no AI was used in the making of this photo"
| dagss wrote:
| Wait ... a Gaussian blur? That doesn't remove ANY information
| from the image. It looks blurred to our eyes but the same
| information is all there.
|
| The information is absolutely not gone.
|
| Does it state that it hallucinates craters that were not there in
| the original, or is it possible the filters simply did an FFT,
| adjusted the power spectrum to what we expect of a non-blurry
| picture, hence inverting the Gaussian blur?
|
| EDIT: Note that a deblur of a smooth but "noisy" image can cause
| "simulation" or "hallucination" entirely without AI. Could be any
| number of things causing an output image like that (wavelet
| sharpening, power spectrum calibration, ...). Even if the
| information isn't recoverable as such, a photo of a Gaussian blur
| has an unnatural power spectrum that could easily "trick"
| conventional non-AI algorithms into doing such things.
|
| Especially since the only thing I see in the output is "more
| detail" (i.e. simply a different power spectrum than the author
| expected..)
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _The information is absolutely not gone._
|
| Continue to read through paragraphs 4 and 5 of the "Conclusion"
| section.
| dagss wrote:
| Well it is a conclusion written without knowledge of signal
| analysis.
|
| The input to the algorithm will be an image with a power
| spectrum that isn't natural, . It would be very natural even
| without "AI" to attempt to "deblur" when faced with such a
| power spectrum.
|
| A deblur of noise can cause "hallucinations" with much
| simpler reasons than AI beong involved.
|
| Could it not e.g. be doing some wavelet transforms or FFTs
| and automatic power spectrum calibration?
| SahAssar wrote:
| The parent is probably talking about the section where they
| clipped the highlights and details where added back in by
| the phone.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Unless you're using floating point numbers and have padded the
| image to infinity, it's literally untrue that applying a
| Gaussian kernel doesn't throw away at least some (if not a lot
| of) information. I think what you intended to say is the blur
| doesn't remove "all" the information. Not to mention he
| downsized the image (likely using bilinear not even bicubic )
| further throwing out a ton of information. Not to mention he
| then showed the image on a display and took a photo from across
| the room. For all practical purposes the technically incorrect
| pedantic statement does not apply even if you correct it.
|
| Looking at the images, it will be fantastical if not a
| violation of information theory if the phone didn't use prior
| information about how the moon looks to create the photo.
|
| Source: spent way more months than I would have preferred
| calculating CRLB values on Gaussian blurred point source
| images.
| matsemann wrote:
| It also happened after downsampling (aka removing information)
| of the image. And when parts of the image was clipped to white
| (aka no information at all). So your point doesn't absolve
| Samsung of guilt as you believe.
| stilley2 wrote:
| Yeah the author glossed over this a bit in my opinion. In
| infinite precision math you're correct, but at some point the
| signal in those higher frequencies is going to be reduced below
| the precision of the storage data type, never mind the dynamic
| range of the monitor and camera he's using.
| dagss wrote:
| It seems clear the author does not have knowledge on the
| subject, more than glossing over -- the article even
| emphasises that information is removed by the blur (100%
| wrong). I agree it may not have destroyed the experiment
| entirely, but it does mean the experiment was conducted
| without knowledge of basic signal processing and I would
| prefer a more through study or analysis before drawing
| conclusions...
| remram wrote:
| You must have "glossed over" the first part of the
| statement (emphasis mine):
|
| > I *downsized it to 170x170 pixels* and applied a gaussian
| blur, so that all the detail is GONE
| duckqlz wrote:
| I have a few questions: Is this specific for the moon or is the
| AI generally sharpening around dark areas? If it is specific to
| the moon then how many common objects does the camera recognize?
| If you did the same test with a picture of a stop sign or a
| popular car would the results be similar? Also is this processing
| done on the camera or does this require an internet connection
| and work on Samsungs end? I have known about AI image enhancement
| for years but the idea of recognizing then re-texturing common
| objects is something I had never considered.
| rwalle wrote:
| While I understand what the author tries to say, I have to point
| out that ship has long sailed. Samsung just pushed it a bit too
| far and slapped a "scene optimizer" label on it.
|
| AI has been used in "cell phone photography" for a few years, at
| lease since Pixel 2 where a mediocre sensor produced much better
| pictures than what people expect (maybe there are other players
| who did this even earlier). And every manufacturer started doing
| it, including Apple. Otherwise, do you think "night mode" is just
| pure magic? Of course not, algorithms are used everywhere.
|
| How do you define "fake"? In podcasts, Verge editor Nilay Patel
| has asked various people "what is a photo", because the concept
| of a "photo" has become increasingly blurry. That is the question
| the author is asking, and people may have different answers from
| the author's.
| bsder wrote:
| Using algorithms to take multiple pictures and stack them
| together is fine. The information is real, exists, and
| objective. People in the background won't (for example)
| suddenly be facing the other way because of the algorithm.
|
| The problem is that AI isn't just interpolating data. It is
| wholesale adding extra data _that simply doesn 't exist_. The
| person in the background is facing left, but the sensor
| couldn't _possibly_ have captured that detail even after
| multiple images--it was a coin flip that the AI made.
|
| The issue is that, like privacy, most people won't care ...
| until they do. By that time, it will be too late.
| eternalban wrote:
| Photo is an interesting word. It's meaning is clarified by
| other words, such as _photorealism_ , _photofinish_. These
| words will (strictly) lose their meaning if photograph simply
| means image captured and processed by a device.
|
| Curiously and revealingly, the political word _photo-op_ stands
| alone in this photo- parade of words in the age of photo-
| imaginings. The universe does indeed have a sense of humor.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > Otherwise, do you think "night mode" is just pure magic?
|
| Night mode definitely uses some AI but most of the result is
| from stacking frames. Samsung here did not label it as a "scene
| optimizer". Their marketing just calls it Space Zoom. The only
| disclaimer they provide is "Space Zoom includes digital zoom,
| which may cause some image deterioration."
| kramerger wrote:
| Note that this behaviour is limited to scene mode, which has a
| moon shoot mode. You can always use the normal or pro mode
| where the pictures are not magically enhanced.
|
| Is is ridiculous that OP consider this "cheating". Most people
| just want a nice picture and don't give a damn about AI.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| eg "Do We See Through a Microscope?"
| https://philpapers.org/archive/HACDWS.pdf
| drhagen wrote:
| > I downsized it to 170x170 pixels and applied a gaussian blur,
| so that all the detail is GONE. This means it's not recoverable,
| the information is just not there, it's digitally blurred
|
| Strictly speaking, applying a Gaussian blur does not destroy the
| information. You can undo a Gaussian blur with a simple
| deconvolution, which is something I would expect even a non-AI
| image enhancement algorithm to do (given that, you know, lenses
| are involved here).
|
| I'd like to see what detail can be "recovered" with just the
| downsizing, which DOES destroy information.
| [deleted]
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| Well the op did downsize so details had to be reconstructed.
| Also the noise from having the image being projected through a
| screen and then a retaken through the camera sensor means that
| it isn't just your standard perfect convolution.
| notatoad wrote:
| if you downsize an image to 170x170px and then blow it up so
| it's visible to a camera from across the room without any sort
| of blurring, it's not going to look like anything and the
| camera's object detection won't recognize it as the moon - it's
| just going to look like a huge pixel grid.
| Jabbles wrote:
| I am not quite so confident. I would like to see an
| experiment to test how badly you can distort an image of the
| moon before the AI stops recognising it.
| padjo wrote:
| They say they also clipped all whites above a certain level
| too. That's just information that's been destroyed and then
| invented by the AI right?
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| This problem is not new. In 2019, Huawei introduced a special
| image processing feature in its smartphone camera app, the "Moon
| Mode" (opt-in). Missing details are added to the moon photos via
| machine learning inference from a pre-trained model. Huawei then
| started marketing these processed images as a showcase of its new
| smartphone's photography performance. In China, it was widely
| criticized by tech reviewers [1][2] as misleading, and "Moon
| Mode" became a running gag among tech enthusiasts for a while.
|
| It seems that Samsung simply adopted the same tactic to
| compete...
|
| On the Huawei "Moon Mode" controversy, one can even find a
| research paper [3] published in a peer-reviewed social studies
| (!) journal, _Media, Culture & Society_:
|
| > _This is where the controversy began: Chinese tech critic
| Wang's (2019) posting on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of
| Twitter, made quite a splash. In his post, Wang put forward a
| shocking argument: he said that Huawei's Moon Mode actually
| photoshops moon images. He contended that, based on his self-
| conducted experiments, the system 'paints in pre-existing
| imagery' onto photographed takes, re-constructing details that
| are not captured in the original shots. Huawei immediately
| refuted these claims, stressing that the Moon Mode system
| 'operates on the same principle as other Master AI modes that
| recognize and optimize details within an image to help
| individuals take better photo ' _
|
| [1] https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-
| co...
|
| [2] https://www.phonearena.com/news/Is-the-Moon-Mode-on-the-
| Huaw...
|
| [3]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01634437211064...
| troyvit wrote:
| It would be so fun to hook a phone up to a telescope and take a
| picture of, say, Jupiter, and see if it overlays the ringed
| planet with the moon's characteristics.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| I knew I saw this before.
| [deleted]
| fareesh wrote:
| What happens if you film a crime in the apartment far away and
| the AI fills in the details?
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| This question is less hypothetical than it seems. In recent
| years, there has been amazing breakthroughs in low-light
| photography with machine learning, such as [1]. It's not hard
| to imagine that it would be applied to future surveillance
| cameras.
|
| I imagine that in most cases, the "AI" would work just fine at
| guessing things. But important edge cases exist, including the
| possibility of adversarial machine learning spoofing attacks to
| create false images. Imagine faking a crime scene this way, it
| would something straight from cyberpunk fiction.
|
| [1] Learning to See in the Dark
| https://cchen156.github.io/SID.html
| strus wrote:
| How it is possible that people belived that these images are not
| artificially enchanced? Like it is obvious, there is no way a
| phone sensor can take such detailed photos of the Moon. I am
| surprised this was even a discussion.
| crummy wrote:
| How am I supposed to know how much detail a phone's sensor can
| capture?
| gadtfly wrote:
| Officially documented by Samsung in Korean:
|
| https://r1.community.samsung.com/t5/camcyclopedia/%EB%8B%AC-...
|
| Ongoing arguments over what this counts as:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11or39c/samsungs_a...
|
| https://twitter.com/search?q=samsung%20moon
| butz wrote:
| Do we really need cameras at this point? Remove cameras, and just
| ask user what he is taking photo of, then generate the image.
| sdiupIGPWEfh wrote:
| Still need some cheap camera sensor so that you have data to
| upload to Facebook and the FBI, though. Otherwise, I've
| hypothesized the same.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| In this regard, the AI is acting just like the human brain -
| adding details that may or not be present in what the viewer is
| seeing. Details that the viewer expects to see, so the brain
| delivers against this expectation.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Samsung is such a tasteless company.
|
| This is a cool and useful tech, but it obviously needs a good
| marketing story to avoid looking creepy. To think that no one
| will notice just makes it worse.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| yeah 5 minutes with their flavor of android makes that
| apparent, woof
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| It's creepy how deceptive phone cameras are. I've noticed in
| pictures that I've taken that certain elements have been
| postprocessed to look better than they actually are.
| [deleted]
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