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Rittenhouse lawyer claims iPad pinch-to-zoom uses AI to fake video footage
- senectus1 5y agoRittenhouse is going to win this. Mostly due to the incompetence of the prosecution. But this story reeks of "Sufficiently advanced technology = Magic" Blaming it on the boogie monster of "AI"
- strangeattractr 5y agoThe prosecutor has a tough job. He's trying to prove murder in one of the most obvious and well documented cases of self-defence in history. There is so much video evidence that shows a reasonable person would fear for their lives in that situation that its insurmountable. When you throw in a star witness who is repeatedly shown to lie you realise the mistake was bothering with the trial at all.
- short12 5y agoThe best thing the prosecutor needs to do is ask as few questions as necessary to keep Rittenhouse talking.
- irthomasthomas 5y agoInteresting. I watched to the break. Defence says a pinch zoomed video has pixels inserted by an algorithm and they need to understand that process before accepting a zoomed video as evidence. Prosecution says "but everyone does pinch to zoom every day. Its just like using a magnifying glass on a photo." ￣\(^o^)/￣
- donarb 5y agoAll the while not understanding that projecting a video of unknown resolution onto a large screen in the courtroom could have the same effect as zooming the image.
- MillenialMan 5y agoThat's not really true. Video upscaling is probably going to be linear interpolation, which is very unlikely to add meaningful artifacts, but an intelligent zoom that tries to add visually meaningful information may change the apparent content.
- paulgb 5y ago> Video upscaling is probably going to be linear interpolation This is probably true of the technology that's currently in the courtroom, but not for much longer, e.g.[1]. Apple have even done research on this[2], although I can't find anything that says it's currently in use on the iPhone/iPad. [1] https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/the-secret-behind-8k-upscaling https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/the-secret-behind-8k-upsca... [2] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/gan https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/gan
- Krisjohn 5y agoSeeing the mess my 4k "smart" TV makes of 1080p video with parallax scrolling (say a car driving between two rows of trees, filmed from the side), I think we're well past linear interpolation in consumer devices with upscaling.
- boole1854 5y agoCounterpoint: projecting a video onto a large screen is just well-understood optical physics whereas the iOS "video up-scaling function" is a black box.
- nabakin 5y agoI've never thought about using super resolution on video/image zooming but that's actually a really good idea if iOS and Android don't already do it.
- NoblePublius 5y agoI watched this live. This is a standard objection in any criminal proceeding when digital evidence is introduced. The defense admitted he doesn’t know what he’s talking about (he kept saying “logarithm” when he meant “algorithm”) but asserted a well established precedent that requires digital evidence be accompanied by affidavits of its authenticity, especially in a context where it is being enhanced (magnification is enhancement). What I don’t like about this coverage is that it ignores the much more salient fact that the prosecution has utterly collapsed in the last two days. The prosecution witnesses have explicitly endorsed Kyle’s self defense theory and the prosecution has obviously acted in bad faith since.
- gota 5y ago> What I don’t like about this coverage is that it ignores the much more salient fact that the prosecution has utterly collapsed in the last two days. Well, this post (or rather the HN thread) is about a mention to the technology and its impacts on society, not the case itself. Being so politically charged it's a much worse topic for an online forum > This is a standard objection in any criminal proceeding when digital evidence is introduced. As it should be - they need to understand what is going on to make fair calls. In this case the lawyers and prosecutors (and judges, and jury) may have no idea that when we say a pixel is 'imagined and created' when magnification is applied it is very unlikely that enough pixels will be created to insert an human-recognizable object where there was none Come to think of it, software to introduce objects when zooming in on image/video would be quite challenging. It's an interesting problem
- rory_isAdonk 5y agoI've been waiting for this post.
- djanogo 5y agoMSM and prosecutor got screwed over of their narrative by their own witness who disproved it (He said "Correct" for "Kyle shot you AFTER witness pointed gun at Kyle.."), the prosecutor was trying to bring up things that happened 4 months later in front of jury even though judge instructed both parties not to bring up issues that didn't happen during shooting with out prior discussion (without jury). Other lawyers pointed out correctly that prosecutor is stuck between rock and hard place, the best outcome for him personally would be to get mistrial.
- djanogo 5y agoAlso this BS article fails to mention that both judge and lawyer mentioned that they DO NOT understand the technology and defense attorney said that they had expert look at it and the expert told them about "AI and algorithms", he also apologized for saying "algorithms" incorrectly. Judge said he has no idea on how this technology works and only mentioned "inserting pixels" because the prior expert who looked at the pictures told them about "inserted pixels". Judge told prosecutor he is free to bring a expert who can attest to accuracy of video taken with zoomed in iphone and then zoomed in through iPad for display to Jury. Prosecutor also couldn't tell Judge which software they were using to zoom in on iPad.
- tfandango 5y agoI listened to approx 10 min of this whole trial and this is the part I got! He said logarithms instead of algorithms which made me chuckle.
- belltaco 5y agoI like how Fox News, all the right wing websites, and talk radio that are used by 50% of the US population, is somehow not 'mainstream media'. Can someone explain.
- djanogo 5y agoFox news also publishes lot of BS, I consider anything ranked up by Google/Twitter/Youtube or have a "fact checkers" to control narrative be MSM.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hirundo 5y agoThe curious part of this is that the defense felt the need to challenge this footage, since it isn't damaging to the defendant, zoomed in or not. To me, to the extent that it is clear, it shows Rittenhouse retreating and responding to attacks, rather than the reverse. Does anyone else see something in that particular video that supports the felony charges?
- jboggan 5y agoThe prosecution is going to argue that the footage shows Rittenhouse raising his rifle at someone before being charged by Mr. Rosenbaum, out of sequence with his own testimony of what transpired.
- DrJones1098 5y agoThanks for the info. It looked like Rosenbaum chased him for like 10 seconds while Rittenhouse was running away, threw something at him, and they're going to argue that in the last single second before the shooting he possibly raised his rifle in a grainy video where the question of pixels is an issue? That seems weak but I guess the prosecution needs something.
- tablespoon 5y ago> That seems weak but I guess the prosecution needs something. From what I've read, the prosecution has been pretty weak. Their witness are often helping the defense at least as much as they're helping the prosecution, and the judge got angry with them the other day for likely deliberately going somewhere they weren't allowed to go. https://apnews.com/article/kyle-rittenhouse-trial-judge-directed-verdict-788879e4deb6d4639adab573ee3ff753 https://apnews.com/article/kyle-rittenhouse-trial-judge-dire...
- hajile 5y agoThey are lying by omission. It was WAY more than that. The prosecutor was saying that Rittenhouse must be guilty because he chose not to speak before the trial. That is an egregious violation. Judge wants a clear jury verdict due to the politicization of the case. In any other circumstances, I'd bet heavily that a mistrial with prejudice would be immediate. I'm guessing there's a non-zero chance that the prosecutor gets officially censured for this case. Between that and the testimony about coercing the witness and interfering with the detective, there's a lot of wrong stuff going on here.
- pohl 5y agoMagnets, how do they work
- triactual 5y agoSurprisingly few people can explain the mechanism that makes magnets “work.”
- 0x7E3 5y agoI'm going to try to stick to the technical concerns this event raised, not the procedural ones. There was a previous witness who had enhanced several videos for the prosecution. He testified that part of the enhancement process did involve "adding pixels that weren't there previously". It seems important that these videos were enhanced by a person who has a professional reputation to uphold. Those videos were admitted as evidence. The defense is positing the concern that a similar enhancement process happens when you zoom in on a video on the iPad. If it does, there is obviously no professional oversight. Keep in mind that this is a very small section of the screen that they were concerned with - a very small number of pixels of a slightly different color than there surroundings would be construed to be the object in question. I have no idea if playback software the defense intended to use had an auto-enhance feature, but it does seem telling that the prosecuting attorney declined to certify when the judge asked that the video would not be altered. Instead he continued to make an argument of "we all do this all the time in our daily lives, it's common sense". I do not recall him mentioning which software he intended to use for playback, so it would be hard to say for certain whether he was correct or not.
- jerkstate 5y agoFirst of all, interpolation DOES use algorithms which could reasonably be described as AI. If it's too blurry to tell, the actual intelligence of the observer will indeed fill in the detail of what they believe is happening. So if the prosecutor continues to assert "he is pointing his gun" while the pixels blurrily shift around, that may become the observer's impression regardless of what the pixels are actually showing or not showing.
- nabakin 5y agoYou know, with Super Resolution technology, I think this is possible. It would be a great feature to implement if iOS and Android haven't implemented it already.
- heavymark 5y agoI happened to tune on during the part of the live trial. At first was funny seeing them using works like logarithms incorrectly, but then the other side didn't do a great job at explaining either. As he kept saying everyone pinches and zooms and knows what that does so no expert is needed. But just because people all use the feature, that doesn't mean the average person would know if ai is enhancing/inserting pixels to do that or not. Because of this poor argument, later on when he finally starts to touch more on the reality that it has to do with resolution and you are just zooming in our out of full resolution... it was too late, since the by then the judge was confused enough and lacked confidence in both sides to hear it. The magifying glass example didn't seem like a good way to explain that. And finally while pinch to zoom is just bring you close to the real full resolution, off the top of my head, I'm not sure if you keep zooming into the deepest detail if say Apple Photos, etc, does apply any techniques of inserting pixels to show even larger or if stops at the max resolution. Or if the user has accessibility modes on if that further amplifies beyond the available data. And whether that's via linear interpolation like watching an evidence photo on a big screen tv or a different technique. So depending on how much they are zooming in, etc, it's not a completely crazy question to ask. But they could have probably just googled and got answers to that pretty quickly.
- Grieving 5y agoThis was one of the more entertaining parts of the trial. The defense stated that "AI and logarithms" (algorithms) were used to enhance the image when zoomed in, and the prosecution claimed that it was no different from a magnifying glass. Both are right in some way. I think the defense raised a good point that while interpolation algorithms are everywhere, people don't generally understand that by definition these introduce new information not present in the original. It's a general problem with technology, but isn't brought up often in court. On the other hand, I think the prosecution's magnifying glass analogy was apt, but for the wrong reasons; it's an older form of upscaling technology that introduces its own distortions, but is accepted as accurate. It is kind of ironic that the format of the video and whatever transcoding has been performed wasn't delved into.
- Grismar 5y agoI zoomed in on the lawyers head and as I kept zooming in, I ended up with nothing but a big void on my screen. The AI logarithms do indeed have a pretty good idea of what is there.
- swader999 5y agoThe whole prosecution depends on this notion that Kyle raised his rifle to provoke Rosenbaum before the chase ensued. They are trying to do this with about a 30*30 pixel area on a dark video. If he did raise his rifle, there's no evidence of what he's pointing at. It's brutal and the judge allowed instruction to the jury about provocation today. Kyle might do life in prison over this instruction. Brutal.