Wouldn’t looking at the RAW give insight on what’s happening here
iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
61–70 of 467 posts
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#62This is how it begins - SKYNET
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#63Those of us who have been shooting large digital cameras for the past decade and are some times sad that our photos often come out unsharp in poor light compared to smartphones can at least take some joy in this “no free lunch” demonstration. If this is due to stabilization and not some background blur face detection then it’s probably not something you can (or would want to) disable. Taking a telephoto shot with a t…
No free lunch, but an incredibly good value lunch. The quality that comes out of phone cameras is remarkable. And the times it messes up are so rare that it becomes a talking point worthy of hundreds of comments.
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big tech has this uni-modal aporoach to users: they find what maximizes a metric, and works for 75% of the users, but roll it out to 100%. Dealing with the remaining 25% would have low ROI.
Not only tech. Try finding shoes or pants when your size is 1.5 times sigma away from the mean.
As a 5’5 dude buying clothes from American brands is often hilarious. I bought an xs nike trail running tshirt and it’s a good 5 inches too long in the body.
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats headphones.
Taste. It takes time and experience to develop, and the masses on average don't have it. As in, they might have developed taste for a few products, but not most products. Hence, the mass-market products are aimed at people with no taste, because that captures the largest slice of the consumers. Random examples: - In A/B tests, the typical personal will rate louder music as better. Hence, all bars and pubs turn their…
Hearing this and Steve Jobs’ critique of Microsoft, “they have no taste” is stunning.
Taking the iPhone as the mass consumer computer, must mean that as a computing device the iPhone has very little taste…
Which in a sense I can definitely see…
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#66This gives me the same feeling as those ML-powered “enhanced zoom” features: where does the photograph end and the machine made-up fantasy start?
"ML-powered" enhanced zoom can't be trusted.
The moment you need ML magic to magnify you are basically telling the ML "guess what is there based on what we can see and the training database you where trained on". Also due to the nature of such algorithm they do not have any form of common sense or "realistic general purpose" world view, and tend to be black box so it's hard to check if they learned something "stupid"/"ridiculous".
So it's totally possible that somehow it learned to place knifes into the hyper-magnified hands if they have a specific skin color and a turquoise sleeve on a picture with a color scheme as if it's a cloudy day. Or similar arbitrary things. Sure it's supper unlikely but not impossible and there is not good way to find such "bugs". Worse multiple ML systems trained on the same data might share some mistakes and there are just that many huge comprehensive datasets.
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#67I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.
Fully agree. My wife and I went out on a date about a month ago, and during it, she took a selfie of the two of us. There must have been some filter on by default because our faces looked perfectly lit, our skin completely blemish-free, no smile lines, etc. It was a great picture, but I remarked immediately that it didn't look real. And I don't want that -- it's not us but an idealized, optimized version of us. I sim…
First we have the uncanny effect from trying to imitate real life too much. It will be interesting if the effect shows up on the other side of modifying away from real life imagery as well.
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#68I wouldn‘t completely exclude the possibility that a random bit flip caused the ML processing to go haywire.
The probability of a bit flip enabling the leaf-replacer logic instead of causing a weird heisenbug and just crashing the camera app is astronomically low.
There are billions of iphone users taking photos every day. Astronomically rare things happen regularly.
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#69I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone. But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.
Very much agree. I took RAW pictures with my Nikon on a christmas party, and even took the time to properly develop and adjust them. Still, people complained on how "old and bad" their faces looked (in pretty normal pics, nothing fancy). I attribute this to the fact that everybody is now used to phones completely editing faces and smoothing skin and adding saturation, etc., which makes us more "instagramable" althoug…
Just wait until the phones are automatically giving people cartoon character eyes...
Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo
#70I wonder if this has any implications over iPhone (or cellphones in general) photos in court. This might be brought up to overturn any photo evidence from phones.
All photos regardless of the source are a corruption of reality both semantically and technically speaking. I think they should always be used on a case by case basis with corroborating evidence.
I recall reading a lot of fantastic essays on the “reality” of photos when I studied photography at A Level. I’ll have to see if I can dig stuff up, but I recall there being a lot of controversy surrounding posing of bodies in early war photography.