[HN Gopher] Update to the "Samsung space zoom moon shots are fake"
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Update to the "Samsung space zoom moon shots are fake"
        
       Author : ibreakphotos
       Score  : 170 points
       Date   : 2023-03-12 17:43 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
        
       | bee_rider wrote:
       | It will be quite weird to have this brief blip in the
       | anthropological record of like 1980-2010 where cameras were cheap
       | enough that lots of real images were captured, and then 2010-2019
       | where everyone (in rich western countries at least) had cameras
       | _all the time_ and we got tons of real images of everyday life
       | (filters are popular of course but using them is an intentional
       | choice).
       | 
       | Then everyone goes inside for like 2 years (pandemic), there
       | isn't much to take pictures of, and then by the time we start
       | going back outside everything is actually paintings by AI
       | artists.
        
         | zaroth wrote:
         | When the AI generated content outnumbers human content 10,000
         | to 1, and the quality is almost ridiculously varied and
         | sometimes incredible, and no functional system can sustainably
         | authenticate humans without being overrun by bots...
         | 
         | Then the record from that point forward and forever hence will
         | be one of AI, not one of humanity.
        
           | btown wrote:
           | Arguably this is already true of text. We have already
           | entered the age where it is impossible to determine with
           | certainty whether a blog article was written by a human, and
           | so every text data set that includes 2023 internet data will
           | include ChatGPT outputs as ground truth.
           | 
           | Future historians will likely place a great deal of emphasis
           | on 2019 being the year in which we reached a forever-maximum
           | of non-pandemic-tinged _provably_ -human-created data. It's
           | no reason to panic, and the mixed data sets will absolutely
           | be representative of humanity's accomplishments as a whole...
           | but there will be notable differences.
        
             | Ma8ee wrote:
             | It's not that hard to filter content by source. Reputable
             | news sources and authors will not publish AI-generated
             | content (without grave risks to their reputation). And most
             | of the abundant background noise have never provided much
             | value before either.
        
               | krater23 wrote:
               | > Reputable news sources and authors will not publish AI-
               | generated content...
               | 
               | This news sources are not just one blob or a black box.
               | It's different people that are working for money. And we
               | know reputable sources that have published fictionary
               | stories as real over years(see Spiegel in Germany). Now
               | it's really easy to unnotable use AI, so where is the
               | reason why this will not happen?
        
             | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
             | > We have already entered the age where it is impossible to
             | determine with certainty whether a blog article was written
             | by a human, and so every text data set that includes 2023
             | internet data will include ChatGPT outputs as ground truth.
             | 
             | Is that any worse than unreliable humans? Whether they're
             | intentionally lying or just mistaken, internet posts should
             | always be taken with a grain of salt, for decades now.
        
               | dmonitor wrote:
               | The unreliability of humans is still valuable data
               | because it shows what humans were thinking at the time.
        
               | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
               | I guess, but that's a really noisy signal once you
               | account for deliberately misleading posts.
        
               | bee_rider wrote:
               | I think they mean ground truth in terms of what human
               | created content looks like, not ground truth in terms of
               | what is actually going on in the world, which of course
               | we don't collect completely accurately.
        
               | kukx wrote:
               | I wonder what will be the first year when most of the
               | meaningful comments on hacker news will be AI generated.
        
             | flangola7 wrote:
             | I fear the social effects. The days of making long distance
             | friends or relationships over the internet are over.
             | Anonymous communities that don't implement strong KYC are
             | over.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | greedylizard wrote:
               | What is KYC?
        
               | epgui wrote:
               | Know Your Customer
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | A_D_E_P_T wrote:
       | There are aftermarket photography apps. Has anybody tried taking
       | their Samsung S23 and photographing the moon /w one of those? I
       | wonder if the "AI assistant" is limited to Samsung's own bundled
       | camera app, or if it's always on & modifies pictures taken via
       | other apps.
        
         | gruez wrote:
         | You can just turn off "scene optimizer" in the stock app.
        
       | SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
       | Scott Hanselman posted today that this is no secret. Samsung have
       | been talking openly about their "Moon Recognition Engine". It's
       | on their website: In Korean, of course. But there's an automated
       | translation of that too.
       | 
       | https://www.tiktok.com/@shanselman/video/7209770920301399342...
       | 
       | https://hachyderm.io/@shanselman/110012495335125530
        
       | brokenmachine wrote:
       | I wonder what kind of implications this will have for court
       | cases.
       | 
       | There will have to be expert witnesses to discuss any image that
       | is brought in, if it's real or not.
        
       | 323 wrote:
       | Next gen: you go to a music concert and take some crappy photos -
       | low light, far from scene. AI recognizes the artist and downloads
       | artist's most recent high-res stock pictures from GettyImages,
       | has a general model of how a scene is setup, lights, lasers, and
       | re-synthesizes your photo into something with the production
       | quality of a movie concert scene.
       | 
       | In a movie it also resamples the clipped audio with the actual
       | song ran though a "live concert" audio filter, adds some nice
       | crowd noises too.
       | 
       | Next-next-gen: using deep fake technology artist voices a song
       | dedication just for you.
        
         | cwkoss wrote:
         | If crappy phone photos are enough to make a decent depth map, I
         | think Stablediffusion can do this today. The only missing piece
         | would be for the band to train a model on high quality photos
         | from specifically their concerts.
         | 
         | ControlNet is really neat
        
         | ssnistfajen wrote:
         | From a technological perspective those are neat. But AI (or any
         | computer program) hallucinating entire experiences that never
         | existed is kind of disturbing even if said experience is
         | actually nice.
        
         | megablast wrote:
         | I wrote an app 15 years ago that would detect where you've been
         | travelling, and get the best photos from Flickr based on the
         | must see location you passed. No longer need to take photos of
         | the Eiffel Tower.
        
         | TrackerFF wrote:
         | Next-next-next-gen: BigTech corps offers a machine-brain
         | interface so that you can "enhance" your own senses with the
         | help of external processing power. Your reality is about to
         | change, but not without a ton of ads which you cannot escape.
        
           | ThrowawayTestr wrote:
           | You get a neural interface that lets you learn and process
           | information 100x faster but there's always an ad in the
           | corner of your vision. Do you accept?
        
           | Gunnerhead wrote:
           | Yet psychedelics and weed to also enhance your experience
           | will continue to be federally illegal.
        
       | nkurz wrote:
       | Simplified summary for those scared off by a link to Reddit:
       | 
       | He made an image of an intentionally blurry moon, and then used
       | the camera to take a picture of it while it was displayed on the
       | monitor from across the room. The resulting picture was of a
       | sharply detailed moon!
        
         | agilob wrote:
         | Would it not be even easier to prove by simply switching camera
         | app to a non-branded one?
        
           | ghshephard wrote:
           | You don't know where in the stack the optimization is taking
           | place.
        
         | chabes wrote:
         | This is an update to that post, with a new image with a moon
         | and a half image of the moon together in one image.
         | 
         | The full moon is enhanced, while the half image remains blurry.
        
           | kazinator wrote:
           | Which shows you it's not "AI"; it's more like some hacky code
           | running right inside the phone which detects a plausible
           | moon-like object in the image and fills it with pixels from a
           | canned image.
           | 
           | This is a lot like the ages-old trick of a compiler being
           | rigged to recognize particular source file (benchmark
           | program) and pulls out a hand-optimized assembly program.
        
             | cscurmudgeon wrote:
             | > Which shows you it's not "AI"; it's more like some hacky
             | code running right inside the phone which detects a
             | plausible moon-like object in the image and fills it with
             | pixels from a canned image.
             | 
             | This is actually a common mode of breakage of standard
             | vision models.
        
             | kgwgk wrote:
             | > Which shows you it's not "AI"; it's more like some hacky
             | code running right inside the phone which detects a
             | plausible moon-like object in the image
             | 
             | The hacky code runing right inside the phones detecting
             | objects, identifying faces and whatnot is often called AI.
        
               | codeflo wrote:
               | Fucking single if statements are called AI these days.
               | That's not a strong argument. :)
        
               | Dudeman112 wrote:
               | That's because AI is an awful expression :|
               | 
               | Should have always been called "fancy algorithms" from
               | the get-go, calling it "intelligence" opens the
               | interpretation up for a world of misunderstandings
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | ben30 wrote:
               | My Samsung tumble dryer proudly tells me every time I
               | turn it on, "optimised by AI". But it's not smart enough
               | to know it's told me that a hundred times before.
        
               | wongarsu wrote:
               | To be fair, "optimized by AI" doesn't claim that the
               | machine contains AI. Might just be "at some stage in the
               | design process, AI was involved in some way". Which is
               | probably for lots of hardware today.
        
             | avian wrote:
             | Check a comment in the Reddit comment thread. The author of
             | the post repeats the experiment with a blurred and modified
             | picture of the moon that has craters in wrong places. The
             | phone produced a photo of the moon that is less blurry, but
             | also has craters in wrong places. This suggests it's not
             | just using a canned image.
        
             | to11mtm wrote:
             | > This is a lot like the ages-old trick of a compiler being
             | rigged to recognize particular source file (benchmark
             | program) and pulls out a hand-optimized assembly program.
             | 
             | I never knew _compilers_ did this, but I remember it being
             | the case for some games (There was a debacle once upon a
             | time where renaming  'Quake3.exe' to 'Quack3.exe' would
             | reveal such shenanigans on some drivers.)
        
               | remram wrote:
               | A less-evil example is that most compilers can recognize
               | when you wrote a memcpy() and replace it with an actual
               | memcpy() call, which is usually very carefully optimized
               | for your specific processor.
               | 
               | This can cause fun issues like your version of memcpy()
               | (e.g. embedded libc) being replaced by the compiler with
               | a call to itself:
               | https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=56888
        
               | kazinator wrote:
               | * * *
        
               | tialaramex wrote:
               | The ability to figure out what you're doing and then just
               | do that well, rather than attempting to optimise the code
               | you wrote is called Idiom Recognition and has been around
               | for a _very_ long time, like, 1970s or maybe before.
               | 
               | A relatively modern example was people writing code to
               | count set bits in a value, because older languages don't
               | provide an intrinsic to do that and it's often useful,
               | these days your CPU probably has a CPU instruction
               | specifically for that, it's called "popcount" (sometimes
               | spelled popcnt) and so it's valuable to recognise what's
               | going on in the say six lines of C++ in your program and
               | emit a single POPCOUNT instruction instead. If your fancy
               | method to count bits isn't recognised your program goes
               | slower.
               | 
               | The memcpy case is special because C is weird in actually
               | trying to define this as a function, copying memory is so
               | commonly necessary that compilers need to have a pre-
               | baked implementation for the rest of what they do anyway,
               | it's not a surprise that idiom recognition results in
               | your custom memcpy being turned into the built-in memcpy,
               | although in the case you linked that's indeed a bug.
        
               | dotnet00 wrote:
               | This is still the case with games, pretty much every new
               | big release comes with an associated 'game ready driver'
               | release where the driver can detect and adjust some
               | behaviors to better suit that game.
        
               | kazinator wrote:
               | But that provides a real benefit whereas the compiler
               | trick's objective is to look good in a benchmark.
        
             | ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
             | It doesn't tell you that at all, they could just as well
             | have a moon segmentation model that returns the single most
             | likely bounding box to contain a moon and applies another
             | model to it. Or something even simpler, a Hough transform
             | which returns the roundest object. Or a single
             | convolutional model which was trained on images of the moon
             | and therefore doesn't augment multiple moons since that
             | falls outside of its input distribution.
        
             | manojlds wrote:
             | Read the thread. Someone did with photoshopped crater and
             | it enhanced that as well.
             | 
             | It's like saying face recognition didn't recognized when
             | you photoshopped a ear in the photo.
        
         | lwhi wrote:
         | Why would people be scared of a Reddit link?
        
           | xwdv wrote:
           | [flagged]
        
           | MengerSponge wrote:
           | Same reason I'm scared of TV Tropes [1] links.
           | 
           | [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbit
           | Hol...
        
       | yread wrote:
       | If you didn't go through the comments, this one is interesting
       | imo:
       | 
       | someone took a handheld picture of the moon with S21 using GCAM
       | instead of the default app and the results are also quite
       | awesome:
       | 
       | https://imgur.com/a/jf1Cbqu
        
       | furyofantares wrote:
       | I'm not really "nail in the coffin" convinced.
       | 
       | Is there a process that does something akin to identifying the
       | moon, and selecting a special filter for that? I'm pretty
       | convinced of this. (Both by the evidence and also it's apparently
       | advertised as such?)
       | 
       | What is that filter? I don't know, and the answer to this would
       | inform "how fake" I think these images are.
       | 
       | It does seem to be a moon-specific treatment. It doesn't seem to
       | be pasting a JPG of the moon and it doesn't seem to be generating
       | the moon.
       | 
       | How fake it is, is, I think a measure of how dependent the result
       | is on the specific sensor data, and how localized the changes
       | are. If there's a moon-specific filter that's excellent at
       | filling in data "between" sensed pixels without looking at any
       | pixels far away (beyond, perhaps, the initial categorization as a
       | photo of the moon where this filter would be good), that's not
       | very fake to me.
       | 
       | If there was suddenly a new structure on the moon visible to the
       | sensors, I'd want it reflected in the photo. I would consider the
       | process very fake if it couldn't do that at all, and not very
       | fake if it could do it reliably.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | lagadu wrote:
       | Reading further into that thread, someone provides the OP with a
       | blurry image of the moon but with craters in the wrong places:
       | the "AI enhanced" photo is indeed much sharper and detailed than
       | the original but it still retains the craters and land features
       | in the wrong place. This suggests that the processing isn't
       | simply replacing the moon with real, high-quality moon photos but
       | rather that it knows how the moon, or a moon-like object, should
       | look and creates detail on the original image.
       | 
       | This looks a lot like what DLSS does in GPUs.
       | 
       | I'm torn on this: it's fake but it's a good way of getting around
       | optics limitations in certain scenarios. Is fake detail on a
       | photo worse than no detail for non-scientific, consumer devices?
        
         | dmix wrote:
         | Samsung's own spokesperon said this is an explicit feature of
         | the phone.
         | 
         | > But I also want to include one caveat: the S21 Ultra's Scene
         | Optimizer will not suddenly make all 100x zoom photos look as
         | crispy as the Moon. Samsung flat-out says the Scene Optimizer
         | can recognize "more than 30 scenes." That includes the
         | following according to a spokesperson:
         | 
         | > Food, Portraits, Flowers, Indoor scenes, Animals, Landscapes,
         | Greenery, Trees, Sky, Mountains, Beaches, Sunrises and sunsets,
         | Watersides, Street scenes, Night scenes, Waterfalls, Snow,
         | Birds, Backlit, Text, Clothing, Vehicle, Shoe, Dog, Face,
         | Drink, Stage, Baby, People, Cat, Moon.
         | 
         | If it was just the normal camera 'faking' photos it'd be bad,
         | but they literally offer a list of stuff that their zoom tab
         | will AI-optimize. You can still use the regular camera to turn
         | this feature off.
         | 
         | To me this sounds like a cool but simply misunderstood feature.
        
           | thenthenthen wrote:
           | Reminds me of the "Camera Restricta" [1].
           | 
           | I encourage everyone interested in tech and photography to
           | check out Villem Flusser's Towards A Philosophy of
           | Photography [2] and of course Walter Benjamin's The Work of
           | Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [3].
           | 
           | [1] https://hackaday.com/2017/01/28/camera-restricta-ensures-
           | ori... [2] (1984) PDF http://imagineallthepeople.info/Flusser
           | _TowardsAPhilosophyof... [3] (1932) PDF
           | https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
        
           | RobotToaster wrote:
           | >Animals
           | 
           | will be interesting to see how that works with less common
           | animals.
           | 
           | I can see it getting confused with, for example, a capybara,
           | thinking it's a dog, and filling in the details making a
           | picture of a weird hybrid dogybara.
        
         | asddubs wrote:
         | didn't seem like they tried it with a blurry picture of the
         | fake moon though. it doesn't have to be either/or, it can be
         | both.
        
       | metadat wrote:
       | The original discussion unfolded here 2 days ago:
       | 
       |  _" Samsung "space zoom" moon shots are fake, and here is the
       | proof"_
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601 (375 comments)
       | 
       | And to potentially save you a click, here's the original post:
       | 
       | https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...
        
         | praisewhitey wrote:
         | and here's post from 2021 doing the same tests with the Galaxy
         | S21 Ultra
         | 
         | https://old.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/l7ay2m/analysis_sa...
        
       | unxdfa wrote:
       | Yeah I can just about get a decent crop of the moon on my Nikon
       | Z50 with the 250mm lens on it that looks reasonable, if it's on a
       | tripod. There's no way this wasn't going to be some other
       | trickery going on.
       | 
       | What is worrying is why would you buy something with a camera
       | that lies at source. When you need it to tell the truth, how do
       | you know it will be telling it?
        
         | Waterluvian wrote:
         | To play Devil's Abacus for a moment:
         | 
         | Why do you "need it to tell the truth"? I would bet a large
         | number of the non-expert consumers (99% of users) do not care.
         | 
         | But to defeat this own argument: just make a "AI Enhance"
         | option in the UI...
        
           | Robotbeat wrote:
           | Do you ever take pictures of your rental car before and after
           | you return it? Because now your rental company (and/or small
           | claims court) will be able to credibly claim it could've been
           | subtly modified by on-board AI and thus no longer admissible
           | as evidence.
           | 
           | Besides stuff like this is like pouring gasoline onto
           | conspiracy theory movements like Flat Earthers. Those may be
           | just 1% of the US a population. But you know what isn't just
           | 1%? Young Earth Creationists, who believe in a similar
           | conspiracy theory of scientists changing the geologic record
           | and maybe astrophysical records as well. These types have
           | large, maybe even disproportionate, political power as well.
        
             | Waterluvian wrote:
             | You've won me over.
        
           | aendruk wrote:
           | Loving the connotations of "Devil's Abacus".
        
           | unxdfa wrote:
           | Your last point is spot on.
        
         | to11mtm wrote:
         | > Yeah I can just about get a decent crop of the moon on my
         | Nikon Z50 with the 250mm lens on it that looks reasonable, if
         | it's on a tripod.
         | 
         | Yeah 300+ is more comfortable for moonshots on APSC sensors,
         | unless you are in -really- good conditions (i.e. perfect sky,
         | far away from artificial lighting.) With 400mm I was able to
         | take a 'pretty dang good' moonshot just outside of my house,
         | even with a little bit of haze that day. It took a good amount
         | of tweaking in DXO to look -great-, but it was worth it.
         | 
         | > What is worrying is why would you buy something with a camera
         | that lies at source. When you need it to tell the truth, how do
         | you know it will be telling it?
         | 
         | This is one of the reasons I still don't care for getting rid
         | of my DSLRs and shoot raw [0] (Besides, PureView was the last
         | phone camera setup I actually enjoyed.)
         | 
         | At the very -least-, these should be settings that have very
         | obvious controls including turning it off by default, and
         | Ideally should be 'opted in.' Otherwise it opens up the
         | possibility that what is happening could count as cheating at
         | certain photo benchmarks.
         | 
         | [0] Okay I also shoot raw to laugh at how awkward some of
         | Sony's E-mount lenses are without lens profile correction
         | applied. Looking at you SEL16F28.
         | 
         | Edit: Context of what you can do at ~550mm equiv. F8, ISO 250,
         | 1/320: https://imgur.com/a/ryoqQB9
        
           | ghshephard wrote:
           | I don't know if DSLRs have changed much - but don't they all
           | require post-processing in order to get any type of sharp
           | picture? Out of the camera they aways seemed to be fuzzy as
           | crap until you ran a sharpening filter.
           | 
           | That is - any time you are shooting digital, you don't every
           | look at what the camera saw, but at what some computer
           | interpreted it to be.
           | 
           | I'd be interesting in knowing what that picture of the moon
           | looked like right out of the raw capture.
        
             | unxdfa wrote:
             | No they don't require that. I honestly, and I know this
             | will annoy people, shoot jpeg and it's sharp out of the
             | camera.
        
             | Etheryte wrote:
             | Unless I misunderstood you, this is a common misconception
             | -- with digital cameras there is no "real" or "raw"
             | picture. What the camera captures is just the output of an
             | analog-to-digital converter. How that resembles a picture
             | at all is always a matter of subjective interpretation,
             | there is no ground truth.
        
               | hef19898 wrote:
               | RAW files so are as close to what the sensor saw as you
               | might actually get. As opposed to the camera-created
               | JPGs, which can look great but have much less data to
               | work with. Or the JPGs created in-camera using in-camera
               | processing (saturation, contrast, sharpness.
               | 
               | I shoot both, RAW and JPG fine. The latter for quick
               | sharing, with in-camera processing except for action
               | shoots at 9 fps. JPG fine never runs into buffer limits,
               | RAW or JPGs using processing does so. And for birds in
               | flight or sports or similar I don't care that mich about
               | RAW anyway.
        
               | musictubes wrote:
               | Thank you for calling them raw files and not images.
               | 
               | Too many people think of raw files as analogous to slides
               | shot in film cameras. In reality they are digital
               | representations of the analog voltages made by sensors.
               | In order to "see" a raw file it has to be processed which
               | usually means demosaicing and assigning color to values
               | based on what the camera manufacturer has provided. Oh
               | and of course different displays will reproduce colors
               | and brightness levels differently as well.
               | 
               | In reality there isn't any such thing as an unmediated
               | digital photograph. What is being done by smartphone
               | cameras is a little further down the processing curve but
               | is on the same continuum of "regular" digital photography
               | IMO. This second test shows to me that Samsung is trying
               | to give the photographer as sharp a picture of what they
               | took a picture of.
               | 
               | And analog photographers shouldn't get but so smug about
               | capturing the "actual" image. Even if you shoot
               | transparency film or collodion wet plate the resultant
               | image is still mediated by the materials. Color
               | reproduction, contrast, and of course the translation
               | from 3d world/object to 2d are still enormous
               | manipulations. Taking a picture will always be
               | transformative compared to the original subject.
               | 
               | So what is considered an "accurate" photograph will
               | always be a philosophical question. IMO I wouldn't what
               | Samsung has done to be "fake." A lot of these arguments
               | really sound like DSLR owners being upset that decent
               | pictures can be made with pocket cameras.
        
         | hef19898 wrote:
         | A full moon is what, 1/250 sec of a shutter speed? 250 mm on a
         | DX sensor gets you to 370 mm, so yes, 1/250th is a tadvslow to
         | handhold. One of the reasons I like heavier camera bodies, I
         | get a lot less movement blur with those.
         | 
         | Agree on the camer-faking-pictures bit, who wants that?
        
           | unxdfa wrote:
           | I shot this at 1/500 iso 400 f6.3 at equiv 375mm:
           | https://imgur.com/ppj8U2Z - no edit other than crop.
           | 
           | I reckon I could have hand held it actually. The lens has
           | pretty decent VR in it. Will wait until there's a full moon
           | again and have another go.
           | 
           | And yeah I want my pictures to look natural.
        
             | hef19898 wrote:
             | That does look a bit blurry. Did you shoot with VR from a
             | tripod?
        
               | unxdfa wrote:
               | I'm in the middle of London in the UK so that's pollution
               | haze.
        
               | hef19898 wrote:
               | So bad? Shit, I never expected that... Over here, you
               | need either fog or cloud cover for the moon to be so
               | hazy...
        
               | unxdfa wrote:
               | Yeah it can get quite bag. I'm right near the airport as
               | well which doesn't help.
        
               | hef19898 wrote:
               | I guess I'm lucky then, in clear nights max I get is
               | atmospheric haze. Other than that, from the living room
               | window, the moon is crisp sharp. Despite living in a city
               | of 300k odd people...
        
         | dotnet00 wrote:
         | The fact is that most people are not looking for a phone camera
         | to tell the 'truth', they're simply looking for good images
         | similar to what they're used to seeing from pros with their
         | much more fancy equipment (and remember that most of those
         | photographs are also heavily edited, just by a human instead of
         | AI). The only objective truth that matters much to the average
         | person is stuff like the text or qr code remaining correct.
        
           | unxdfa wrote:
           | I think it's more difficult than that. People are intimately
           | aware when things are not what they seem. The brain is really
           | good at being suspicious about stuff. If you take a photo and
           | it comes out better than you can see yourself, then questions
           | will be asked. This discontinuity does not sit well.
           | 
           | As for the professionals, a lot of stuff is edited yes. But
           | there is an art to not needing to do any editing worth
           | mentioning. I think there's some intellectual honesty in not
           | painting over any cracks.
        
           | Mordisquitos wrote:
           | Most people do not care about their phone camera telling "the
           | truth" because they are operating under the base assumption
           | that cameras _do_ tell the truth, and that their phone camera
           | is honestly Very Good(tm) at capturing the true image that
           | they 're seeing with such a level of detail. That customers
           | are not aware of the level to which professional images are
           | processed is no justification for these features being
           | sneaked in.
           | 
           | If these features were openly presented as some kind of
           | augmented reality or editing it wouldn't be an issue, but as
           | it stands it is no different from, for example, presenting an
           | entertainment television network as if it were actual fact-
           | based news, and justifying it by arguing that viewers are not
           | looking for the truth but for something that makes them feel
           | that they know the truth.
        
       | mrtksn wrote:
       | It happens that Samsung is actually doing brilliant job in faking
       | it, even accounting for obstruction like tree branches etc:
       | https://twitter.com/David4252579/status/1634919880217731075
       | 
       | All this could have been OK if Samsung wasn't misleading people
       | into believing that the picture is a result of computational
       | photography and excellent optics.
       | 
       | I would love to have this in my phone's camera, but clearly
       | identified as details added after the fact and might not
       | represent the actual scene. It's done so well that practically no
       | one noticed and people like MKBHD reeved it as a photography
       | achievement.
       | 
       | The truth is, the non-AI implementations also fail to capture how
       | we see the Moon and fixing it with fake details is a welcome
       | improvement as long as it's clear that that's not actual capture.
        
         | sorenjan wrote:
         | According to a comment on Reddit this only happens when "Scene
         | Optimizer" is active in the camera. I don't know if this is the
         | default, it probably is nowadays, but my phone camera's
         | equivalent is labeled AI.
         | 
         | I think the public needs to be educated that modern AI
         | basically means to make up new data based on a statistical
         | model from training data, i.e. fake.
        
           | mrtksn wrote:
           | In that comment which refers to an article, scene optimiser
           | is described as AI optimising photography parameters like
           | exposure, doesn't mention making up details. If this is
           | Samsung's position, then it's totally not cool.
        
       | xattt wrote:
       | I'm just frustrated that there isn't even basic thought from
       | Samsung's end. It could at the very least pull location data,
       | check to see if the moon is above the horizon for the location,
       | check to see if the phase of the moon matches what it sees and
       | THEN apply the filter.
        
         | msm_ wrote:
         | Do we know what it's doing exactly? It can be just doing some
         | AI enhancement during post-processing. In this case the moon is
         | not literally hardcoded, but a part of some opaque machine
         | learning model.
        
       | achairapart wrote:
       | I'm amazed at this New York Times article from 1984 narrating
       | about a "not-too-distant future" that is actually happening now:
       | 
       | https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/04/magazine/photography-s-ne...
       | 
       | > In the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will
       | probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or
       | nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart. We
       | may have to rely on the image maker, and not the image, to tell
       | us into which category certain pictures fall.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | drhagen wrote:
       | I'm still skeptical. He blurred it and then cropped it. The sharp
       | edge from the cropping is going to mess up the deconvolution
       | optimization by causing any and all deconvolution to strongly
       | reduce sharpness along that edge. If I'm right, the Samsung would
       | restore both halves equally well if the blur was applied after
       | the cropping rather than before.
       | 
       | I still want to see this whole thing done without Gaussian blur,
       | which is readily reversible by even primitive algorithms.
        
         | redox99 wrote:
         | > which is readily reversible by even primitive algorithms.
         | 
         | Not true unless you know beforehand the exact kernel. Besides,
         | there's 0 reason why a camera software be programmed to, or
         | attempt to revert Gaussian blur.
         | 
         | And finally, he downsampled the image, and you can't recover
         | from that.
        
           | geoduck14 wrote:
           | Isn't a gaussian blur a pretty standard blur done by a poorly
           | focused camera? Perhaps Samsung went to great lengths to
           | reverse a Gaussian blur because it _happens all the time_?
        
             | Jasper_ wrote:
             | No, a real camera would give you a box blur, because the
             | out-of-focus light rays are distributed uniformly across
             | the sensor.
        
             | toxik wrote:
             | Gaussian blur is indeed super common in nature, any sum of
             | noise will be Gaussian in the limit.
        
             | jrockway wrote:
             | Gaussian blur and the blur from out-of-focus lenses are a
             | different kind of blur:
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defocus_aberration
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur
        
         | sorenjan wrote:
         | Perfect deconvolution of a gaussian blur is only possible in
         | theory, or in ideal cases where you control the signal end to
         | end, like a programming assignment. In reality there's plenty
         | of sources of errors, like discretization noise, lens blur,
         | sensor noise, and SNR is instrumental to the result. I've never
         | seen a blurry image get reconstructed using deconvolution
         | without artifacts.
         | 
         | Then there's the fact that a photo enhancement program has no
         | reason to even try deconvolving gaussian blur, they should use
         | a more appropriate kernel that better describes out of focus
         | blur.
         | 
         | His original blurred moon image is available in his first post.
         | Without even taking the detour of photographing it from a
         | monitor, try using his image and any deconvolution software you
         | want, and try getting anywhere near his result.
        
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