[HN Gopher] When photography "produces something other than phot...
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When photography "produces something other than photographs"
Author : chippy
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-06-01 10:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (we-make-money-not-art.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (we-make-money-not-art.com)
| cryptonector wrote:
| How does this AI sound camera thing detect color? I can see such
| a device seeing shapes and movements, but not _color_.
| mzs wrote:
| Maybe because he trained it on Mexico City videos and as an
| example in the subway for those particular sounds the ANN best
| matched the subway, the subway where in the training set the
| trains were that color.
|
| That was a great question BTW!
| johnp271 wrote:
| This artist's several sentence summary of an ANN and relating it
| to prejudice is fascinating: "The output of an artificial neural
| network can be roughly defined as a conclusion obtained by
| generalising a limited set of observations. Surprisingly
| prejudice can be defined in the same way. This will always be a
| problem with systems that generalize information. No matter how
| large and representative a dataset might be there will always be
| an eccentric outlier that will break the system." On the one hand
| this succinctly sums up the challenges we face with AI systems
| becoming more and more ubiquitous and on the other hand the
| reality we non-artifical intellegent humans face in living our
| lives and dealing with day to day encounters.
| jchw wrote:
| It's interesting. Everybody is always talking about creating
| unbiased machine learning models, but we're still no closer to
| cracking the code on unbiased humans.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm not biased. It's everyone else that is.
| Solvency wrote:
| In the data sense isn't bias literally just the result of
| limited/narrow data? So isn't the problem not in how you
| train models but simply the fact that it's
| impossible/exceeding difficult to provide omnipotent and
| universal data?
| bravura wrote:
| Bias of a data set is when it doesn't reflect the true
| underlying distribution of nature.
|
| So a face corpus with only white faces doesn't reflect the
| diversity of faces one encounters in the world.
|
| With that said, unbiasing data is extremely difficult
| because the true distribution of things is unknown and
| sometimes subjective. The visual images you would encounter
| as a human from birth to death growing up in a first world
| country would be very different from that of a drone's
| video camera. Are we really sure that imagenet should be K%
| animals and not K/2% animals? And if you train a machine
| learning algorithm on every possible image with every
| possible pixel, it will just learn noise.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "The output of an artificial neural network can be roughly
| defined as a conclusion obtained by generalising a limited set
| of observations. Surprisingly prejudice can be defined in the
| same way."
|
| Not really surprising. The first thing they teach in data
| science is that bias is everywhere. One of the first things
| taught in programming is garbage in garbage out and that
| computers do _exactly_ what we tell them. Once you start making
| decisions with biased data you will start to prejudice some
| group.
|
| The quest for non-biases systems is a little like a perpetual
| motion machine. If we all have biases and these machines learn
| from the same data we do, using systems we write, how could one
| expect a different outcome?
|
| The
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| This is why you strive to identify the biases and move them
| from system 1 to system 2 thinking. AI will help humanity
| operate in a direct cognitive regime rather than sub-
| conscious one.
| bequanna wrote:
| Not all or even most subconscious influence on decision
| making is bad. There is plenty we can't yet quantify and
| fully understand.
| bravura wrote:
| There is a classic thereom from computational learning theory
| that says, if all hypotheses are equally likely, then no
| generalization can happen. Ie bias is necessary for learning.
|
| To respond to some sibling comments: Yup, this is prejudice.
| I'll try to analogize the thereom with an example: Without
| prejudice, you can't recognize a leaf in a figure, because
| alternate hypotheses (there are an arbitrary number of things
| in this universe that look like leaves but in fact are not) are
| equally likely.
|
| My advisor one told me that machine learning is the study of
| biases.
|
| "Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able
| to find my way across the room." - William Hazlitt
| etrautmann wrote:
| Isn't this more a study of priors and statistics than bias?
| Bias would be an error between some latent underlying value
| and an estimate of it.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This labels all imperfection in reasoning "prejudice".
|
| Seems like a biased premise.
| jnovek wrote:
| Definition 1 of prejudice in a lazy google search is
| "preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual
| experience." Certainly that figures into most reasoning,
| considering that perfect information is impossible.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That definition seems to cover _everything you 've learned_
| a textbook, video, lecture, another person, or in any other
| indirect way, and which you didn't have an opportunity to
| think through yet.
|
| Which is... most of the thing people know? Including,
| ironically, this very definition, which I learned about
| from a HN comment that quoted a Google search result...
| mc32 wrote:
| I guess it depends on what we define reason and reasoning
| as. Are the rules a "reason" even if not "reasoning"?
| jmbwell wrote:
| It doesn't label. It doesn't do anything to "all" of
| anything. It doesn't refer to any "imperfection," and it
| doesn't address "reasoning."
|
| This is a misrepresentation of the parent comment and the
| article.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Interesting article about an extremely thoughtful artist. I liked
| this quote, "...artwork can be seen as an interface to experience
| the world. This makes the artwork akin to a scientific
| experiment, but while the experiment seeks to provide objective
| and repeatable knowledge, the artwork provides meaning and
| alternate points of view."
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I try to look at modern art with similar lens, that way I can
| accept and tolerate at least some of them while pondering about
| their effects on me, and even find beauty in few.
|
| But I have to ignore what giants like Rembrandt achieved, how
| much effort they put in and how universal those messages are.
| And sure as hell I can't and don't want to ignore that.
|
| I guess I'll stay in the museums of the old masters (but not
| too old).
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| >I guess I'll stay in the museums of the old masters (but not
| too old).
|
| On the other hand, I really enjoy the medieval art where
| there is absolutely no perspective and everything is the
| wrong size. I'd go to an exhibit just for that.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I am somehow drawn to the old Dutch masters and early
| Impressionists. Previously, I never was much of an art guy,
| since I took up photography again I look at art differently.
| Especially the play with light and shadows, composition amd
| colours.
|
| I guess the closer paintings are to reality, the more I can
| take from them, and thus I am drawn more to them. For more
| abstract works I need time. Strangely, I develop a fondness
| for some of Dali's work... That being said, when visiting the
| van Gogh museum, I much preferred his earlier work more
| resembling the old Dutch masters. Still do.
| thinkyfish wrote:
| You bring up an interesting point, not all modern art is
| directed at anyone other than the artist themselves. Its less
| likely in that framework that a particular artist just
| happens to create art that most people would also like and
| create a name for themselves and there are fewer trying to
| show off an absurd quantity of craftsmanship in a single
| work.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I like the site in general for its dedication to Hard Art. I
| used to visit at least weekly some ten years ago just to inhale
| a little bit of that European-tinged creativity. I'm happy to
| see it make the front page of HN. I should return to visiting
| more often.
| webel0 wrote:
| I like the effort that the artist put into designing objects that
| we might consider to be strictly functional. For example, his
| data collection device and even the suit he worse to do data
| collection.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Artists (specifically conceptual artists) are generally poor
| philosophers. You can expect a sort of a hodge-podge of presently
| fashionable ideas combined with some colloquial observations,
| banality, and inscrutable turns of phrase.
|
| Take the distinction between the natural and the artificial. A
| colloquial distinction is not especially sensible. It's some kind
| of conflation between "man-made", not occurring in "nature" and
| "fake" which confuses a few notions that are not mutually
| dependent on one another.
|
| In the first case, that something is man-made merely means that
| human beings made it. Water can be synthesized, but there is no
| difference between the water we find around us and the water we
| can synthesize. Human production involves the use of reason to
| modify or transform existing things to produce something else.
| But transformation of things is very much universal. Our cells
| transform things. Non-human animals and plants transform things.
| Stars transform things. The universe is in a constant flux of
| transformation. While only human beings are known to produce
| plastic (as far as I know), there is no reason in principle why
| other life forms or physical processes might not effect plastic.
|
| In the second case, the notion of "nature" is a vague, largely
| romantic idea that doesn't seem to mean anything more than
| everything that isn't Man or man-made. Distinguishing Man from
| the rest of the universe is not unreasonable for certain
| metaphysical reasons (for example, the capacity for reason and
| thus moral responsibility; artifact as a product of deliberately
| and directly rational activity). But whence the sense of
| alienation? Perhaps this has to do with human moral failure.
| Traditionally, in the Jewish and Christian traditions, men were
| understood to be stewards of creation (pagan cultures tended
| toward pantheism which incidentally stifled their scientific
| development; modernism tends to denigrate the world by adopting a
| desiccated and reductive metaphysics which, while perhaps
| practical in some cases, is false). Stewardship is a
| responsibility and thus a failure in this regard can create a
| sense of rift.
|
| In the third case, "artificial" can mean "fake", something
| presented as something it is not. But the mere fact that
| something is man-made doesn't mean it is "fake", and artifactual
| identity is dependent in part on the cultural conventions it is
| embedded in.
|
| "Nature", in a traditional metaphysical sense, is merely the
| nature of a thing. There is human nature, the nature of plastic,
| the nature of water or trees or whatever. These are all real
| things and their nature is what makes them what they are. Thus,
| the "unnatural" is that which is opposed to the nature of a thing
| doing it. We say that a desire to eat glass or Styrofoam is
| unnatural because the consumption of it has no nutritive value,
| and the desire to eat is per se ordered toward nutrition. Thus we
| say that the desire to eat glass or Styrofoam is disordered, even
| intrinsically disordered. Wishing to cut your arm off is
| unnatural because human nature is ordered toward self-
| preservation. "Nature" is very teleological, in other words, but
| it is _the_ basis for normativity.
| George83728 wrote:
| So I take it you're a conceptual artist?
| stubybubs wrote:
| So... sounds like this artist statement on the distinction
| between the natural and the engineered has caused you to think
| about yourself, which is kind of the point?
| thanatropism wrote:
| I think artists are compelled to produce "artist statements"
| about their work, and in tune with current intellectual
| fashions too. This is a little like complaining that Ariana
| Grande wears stupid clothes.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| That's a different lensless camera art project than yesterday's
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36139729). Related list of
| lists:
|
| https://github.com/golanlevin/ExperimentalCapture/blob/maste...
|
| https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/situations-post/vernetzte-kamer...
|
| https://unthinking.photography/imgexhaust/three-new-cameras
| "Don't tell me you're going to use that smartphone for night
| photography." "My camera is augmented."
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(page generated 2023-06-02 23:02 UTC)