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iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

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Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#91

Post by 1_player »

Gigachad wrote: post #68
1_player wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, bit flips are quite rare already, in the grand scale of things. So a bit flip that causes that specific behaviour is exponentially rarer.

And you have to prove that there actually is one bit that, when changed, causes faces to be replaced by background objects, in this case leaves.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#92

Post by andbberger »

dathinab wrote: post #66
micheljansen wrote: post #8

This 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"…

OK sure but the distribution of natural images is highly redundant ie pixels are not independent and there is structure to exploit. It's not magic obviously but done properly it's a pretty reasonable thing

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#93

Post by chris_wot »

14 wrote: post #59
gsliepen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obligatory Red Dwarf reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aINa6tg3fo

Take my upvote. This has been posted to HN before but I love seeing it again. Red Dwarf was truly an amazing show way ahead of its time imo. For those who have never heard of it, it is a space based comedy I would recommend to all.

Definitely the best spoof of Blade Runner I've seen so far.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#94

Post by barrkel »

matsemann wrote: post #12

I 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.

I'm finding it increasingly hard to take photographs of unusual light in the sky, because the phone camera keeps trying to normalize it to something it's seen before (i.e. something which matches its tuning and machine learning models), whether it's auto white balance or other computational trickery.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#95

Post by judge2020 »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #90
Gigachad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You guys are conflating 'adjusting light levels and sharness' with 'replacing whole objects in one area of scene with other objects from the scene' I think this particular big demonstrates a massive gap in what people think photoprocessing is, and what it has very recently become

Simply adjusting light levels and sharpness wouldn't produce this good/clear of a photo in the conditions presented - AI/ML image post-processing is a hard requirement for sensors like these.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#96

Post by ixfo »

user-the-name wrote: post #57
mrtksn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It simply means that we no longer have measuring instruments who are used to draw accurate representation of the scene but seed samplers who are used to generate a representation of the scene, not necessarily accurately but artistically. Accuracy used to be the metric but someone figured out that most people are not after accuracy. IMHO it's not fundamentally evil, it's just that it's not the thing we are used to. Wo…

Cameras have never, ever been "accurate". It is not technologically possible to create a photograph that is "accurate". Cameras have always made big tradeoffs to output something that actually looks good to humans.

Well, no, it's not perfectly possible to recreate a singular human vision system and capture and reproduce imagery to match that.

But actually, we have lots of excellent, well-researched and proven standards for accuracy in imaging. Cameras generally target those standards, certainly professional ones. Many cameras - quite clearly - can produce very accurate photographs.

The more worrying trend is that of pervasive post-processing, where we depart from reality and entertain aesthetics.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#97

Post by mc32 »

matsemann wrote: post #12

I 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.

Reality isn’t good enough in the time of Instagram.

People want perfect pictures to reflect their mind’s eye.

In a way this is the way in for a metaverse. Reality isn’t what they seek. They seek an alternate state that is a mix of reality and fantasy.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#98

Post by [deleted] »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #90
Gigachad wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You guys are conflating 'adjusting light levels and sharness' with 'replacing whole objects in one area of scene with other objects from the scene' I think this particular big demonstrates a massive gap in what people think photoprocessing is, and what it has very recently become

[deleted]

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#99

Post by 1_player »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #58
1_player wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but how many iPhone pictures are taken every day? I'm not saying I'm convinced, but even something with 1/1,000,000,000 odds isn't really out of the question for an action that must happen at least millions of times a day.

Your probability estimate is off by a dozen orders of magnitude. As a back of the napkin estimate, an iPhone with 8GB has 64 billion bits that can be flipped. One bit flip per week per user would already be extremely bad, as it would mean on average one random crash or case of data corruption per week.

If you suppose the bit flip happens in the CPU registers, the number of state changes on a modern CPU is so incredibly huge that a random bit flip doesn't just cause a memory load from a wrong address or a crash is, again, much less probable than 1/1e9 odds, by a lot.

And as explained in my other comment, you'd have to show that this behaviour can be expressed in one bit. Is there a bit anywhere in the iOS hardware and software that by changing from 0 to 1 can run a code path that replaces your face with a leaf? I doubt that.

I stand by Occam's razor. This happens because it's a bug introduced by its programmers rather than a random gamma ray that turned a bit to 1.

Re: iPhone camera app replaces person’s head with a leaf in photo

#100

Post by caslon »

alkonaut wrote: post #29

Those 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…

You can set Apple's devices to shoot RAW, and it's usually pretty great, without the painting-like qualities of its default image processing.
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