Computational photography is just at it's first steps. Google photos on p8 allow to replace faces. I expect this feature will be implemented to be done automatically to show you the ideal photo. And I expect some parents will be happy with it - having an ideal photo with ideal face of their children
A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
211–220 of 414 posts
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#212If not already, I expect examples like this will be accumulated and trotted out as part of legal defenses. Valid or not, gross examples like this will probably nudge some judges and juries over their threshold for reasonable doubt. AI manipulations are happening and their bounds can be hard to predict.
Imagine a politician photoed reacting to a member of the public in disgust, except the face was stitched in from moments after. Or, worse, someone captured at the scene of a bomb reacting before the bomb went off?
We have an inbuilt set of assumptions about causality that this AI now violates. That's potentially huge in some very specific scenarios...
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
The case in the article is obviously one that any idiot could have taken without these tools. But "in difficult scenarios", as the GP comment put it, your mistake is assuming people have been taking those photos all along no problem. They have not. People have been filling their photo albums and memory cards up with underexposed blurry photos that look more like abstract art than reality. That's where this sort of te…
In circumstances where it really matters having a prettied up image might be worse than having no image at all. If you rely on the image being correct to make some consequential decision, you could convict someone of a crime, or if you were trying to diagnose some issue with some machine you might cause damage. While if the camera gave an honest but uninterpretable picture you would be forced to try again.
Couple other common cases:
- Photographing serial numbers or readouts on hard-to-reach labels and displays, like e.g. your water meter.
- Photographing damage to walls, surfaces or goods, for purpose of warranty or insurance claim.
- DIY / citizen science / school science experiments of all kind.
- Workshops, auto-repairs, manufacturing, tradespeople - all heavily relying on COTS cameras for documenting, calibrating, sometimes even automation, because it's cheap, available, and it works. Well, it worked.
Imagine your camera fighting you on any of that, giving you bullshit numbers or actively removing the very details you're trying to capture. Or insurance rejecting your claim on the possibility of that happening.
Also let's not forget that plenty of science and even military ops are done using mass-market cameras, because ain't anyone have money to spend on Dedicated Professional Stuff.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Off topic, but does anyone know why when I click on the above link in Firefox the back history is gone as if it was opened in a fresh tab? IG doing sketchy stuff to discourage navigating back to where I came from? Or perhaps the Firefox Facebook container protecting me?
It opens Facebook and Instagram in a Facebook container by default. The container has no history.
Ugh, that seems like a bug which should be fixed. It's pretty inconvenient for users. :(
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#215'photo' is now synonymous with photoshopped.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
If this feature or similar features could be disabled, it doesn't need to be an either/or situation. I don't have an iPhone though, so no idea if it's configurable. But seems that it should be, assuming it's not implemented deep in hardware.
I agree. I'd have no issue with this if it were something people could disable and it was clearly disclosed and explained as the default.
Doesn't even need to have an off-switch, if it would preserve the inputs that went into AI stitching magic, so that one could recover reality if/when they needed it.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
That threat model has existed since the birth of photoshop et al.
Scenario: It's a decade from today and phones are not just stitching together multiple photos but also using generative AI. Apple and all of the other phone makers insist the implementation is safe. The suspect appears in the photo doing something they never actually did. In the chaos of the crime, the phone was left at the crime scene where it was found by law enforcement, no chance the photo could have been photosh…
There was a thread here a little while back [0] on cryptographic proofs for photojournalism. Ultimately, that style of attestation seems the end game.
Journalists, security cameras, emergency service / military body cams and other safety systems provide a trust mechanism that enables provable authenticity from the point of capture (and some form of web of trust to weight or revoke that trust for different audiences). Anything else is assumed to be at least partial hallucination.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
It opens Facebook and Instagram in a Facebook container by default. The container has no history.
Ugh, that seems like a bug which should be fixed. It's pretty inconvenient for users. :(
Probably not trivial since the back button might be linked to history and the container is doing it's job in isolation.
I would expect there is a setting to force opening the container in a new tab if you want to be able to go back.
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#219It wasn't long before we hit this Xerox digits[0] moment in 'photos'. What features do you want in your photocopier or photos?
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-rand...
Re: A reality bending mistake in Apple's computational photography
#220Of course, this is one in a million chance but it highlights very nicely IMO a much bigger issue: what is reality?
Some would say only the classical optical camera would capture faithfully our reality. But does it? The reality of the sunlight is a broad spectrum of radio emissions: UV, infrared and more. Does the optical camera capture these? No. Thus, which reality does it capture? Our perceived reality? Other would argue: at least the optical system would capture events in time faithfully. But does it? What would we see in a femto second? Certainly not the pictures we normally see. So the results of an optical system are also super imposed realities, not very much different than the results of a computational photography.
There is simply no single one reality, only our perceived realities. But if so, can we still call it reality or it’s merely a product of our sense, our perception and hallucination?