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Imagine this future: Sensor quality in phones goes down, AI makes up for it because good sensors are expensive, but compute time in the cloud on Samsung owned

Imagine this future: Sensor quality in phones goes down, AI makes up for it because good sensors are expensive, but compute time in the cloud on Samsung owned servers is cheap. You take a picture on a crappy camera, and Samsung uses AI to "fix" everything. It knows what stop signs, roadways, busses, cars, stop lights, and more should look like, and so it just uses AI to replace all the textures. Samsung sells what's on the image to advertisers and more with the hallucinated data. People can't tell the difference and don't know. They "just want a good looking picture". People further use AI to alter images for virtual likes on Tiktok and Insta. This faked data, submitted by users as "real pics in real places" is further used to train AI models that all seem to think objects further away have greater detail, clarity, and cleanliness than they should. You look at a picture of a park you took, years before, and could have sworn the flowers were more pink, and not as red. You are assured, by your friend who knows it all, that people's memories are fallible; hallucinating details, colors, objects, sizes, and more. The image, your friend assures you further? "Advanced tech captured its pure form perfectly". And thus, everyone will demand more clarity, precision, details, and color where their eyes don't remember seeing.

cjsawyer 4y ago
This is my exact worry with things like chat gpt polluting the scrapable internet. The feedback loop might eventually ruin whatever value the models currently have by filling them with incorrect but plentiful generated nonsense.
dusted 4y ago
Basically this.. As "neat" as AI "improvement" is, I don't think it has any actual value, I can't come up with any use-case where I can accept it. "Make pictures look good by just hallucinating stuff" is one of the harder ones to explain, but you did it well.. Another thing, pictures for proof and documentation, maybe not when they're taken but after the fact, for historical reasons, or forensics.. We can't have every picture automatically compromised as soon as it's taken. (Yes, I know that photoshop is a thing, but that's a very deliberate action, which I believe it should be)
- jfengel 4y ago
  I think the main use case is "I'm a crummy photographer and all I want is something to remind me that I was there" and "Look at my cat. Look! Look at her!" That's me. I'm a lousy photographer, as evidenced by all of the photos I shot back when film actually recorded what you pointed it at. My photography has been vastly improved by AI. It hasn't yet reached the point of "No, you idiot, don't take a picture of that. Go left. Left! Ya know what, I'm just gonna make something up," but it should. I imagine there will remain a use case for people who can actually compose good shots. For the remaining 99% of us, we'll use "Send the camera on vacation and stay home; it's cheaper and produces better pictures" mode.
  - mysterydip 4y ago
    That would actually be a useful feature, I'm aiming the camera but based on what makes "good professional" photos, it suggests "move to the left so you frame the picture well" or "those two people should be more spread out so its not one person with two heads" etc, kindof like lane warnings on cars.
  - Kye 4y ago
    I'm a decent photographer and still use my phone for this. It's good enough, and can even skip the AI stuff if I want to. Or even better: I can keep the AI stuff in the raw and edit its impact on the final photo later.
  - b112 4y ago
    "I'm a crummy photographer and all I want is something to remind me that I was there" This is fine, and I can take good shots but at the same time? I only care about this level of shot most of the time too! But then instead of a 20MP image, which: * takes more space, and ergo, more flash drive space * more space to store, to backup, to send * is made 20MP by inserting fake data Why not have a 2MP image, which is real, and let people's end-use device "fix" it? Because all that post processing can be done when 2x or 4x the view size, too! Because advertising. And that's sad. We'd rather think we have a better pic, and destroy the original. And the space thing is real. Because, that same pic gets stored in gmail with 20 people, backed up, kept in all the devices, and so on! And the LOL of it all, is that I bet when it is uploaded to facebook... it gets downsized! edit: in fact, my email app allows me to resize on email, so I downsize that too! Oh, those poor electrons.
spion 4y ago
I like the story, but I think people will notice pretty quickly as almost everyone reviews their photos right after taking them (so they can compare them with what they see in reality)
- whatisthiseven 4y ago
  True, its just a fun story. This reddit post makes it clear, though, that while people will review the images carefully, they may still not be able to accurately determine differences. Just take the story above with one more minor step: You snap a pic of the park, briefly glanced at it to make sure it wasn't blurry (which the AI would have fixed anyway) or had an ugly glare (it did, the AI fixed it) or worse a finger (the AI also fixed that). You're satisfied the image was captured faithfully and you did a good job holding your plastic rectangle to capture unseen sights. You didn't look closely enough to notice all the faked details, because they were so good. This fake moon super enhance? It already proves people will fall for it. I could easily see people not realizing AI turned the flowers in the picture more red, or the grass just a little too green, etc.
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    People will quickly see that their faces don’t look right. That’s usually the first thing they look at.
    - whatisthiseven 4y ago
      Faces are definitely harder. The story has to get stretched a lot to imagine a total dystopia, but its possible. People like digital mirrors for all their benefits: lighter, more features, music and weather all on one "mirror". You can have voice chats, see how you might look with various makeup/styles/haircuts. This digital mirror gets so popular, and (undermining myself here a bit) high enough quality, that people want these new cool wall screens instead. And you betcha, AI is of course going to be added. Take insta pics without needing to hold a phone, then apply filters all in one with your voice! Some people take dozens of photos, forgetting briefly how they look. Now, people are used to every day seeing themselves in the digital mirror with minor touchups for how they would look if they used some sponsored makeup. They used to do it daily so it would match, but kept forgetting as it always showed the improved version (with a small icon saying, you are 40% matched to the predicted image!). Some 20-something walking around in Chicago passes The Bean, and realizes they don't look quite the same as they did in their home mirror. They take out their phone to take a pic of themselves, which is of course synced to their mirror with the same "makeup enhancement suggestions", still warning them it doesn't match. They put away their phone, confident in the knowledge The Bean is just a dirty and distorted mirror, which is why they don't look as good. The camera has always been trustworthy. Why doubt it today? (again, fun story, I don't think this is likely. Just plausible for some people).
wefarrell 4y ago
I can imagine there will be a lot more “ghost” pictures like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghosts/comments/11jvwy4/after_years_of_hearing_noises_from_the_kitchen_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghosts/comments/11jvwy4/after_years... as AI tries to infer images of people where they aren’t really present.
marcus_holmes 4y ago
Or better, the AI improves your shitty snapshots so they come out great. Every shot is beautifully framed, perfect composition, correct light balance, worthy of a master photographer. You can point your camera any old way at a thing and the resulting photo will be a masterpiece. The details don't quite correspond to reality; to get the framing right the AI inserted a tree branch where there wasn't one, or moved that pillar to the left to get the composition lined up. But who care? Gorgeous photo, right? And the thing is, I don't think anyone would care. You'd get the odd weird comparison where two people take a photo of the same place and it looks different for each of them. And you'd lose the ability to use the collected photos of humanity to map the world properly. I think it's fascinating. Reality is what we remember it to be. We can have a better reality easily ;)
- tzs 4y ago
  That could be fine as long as there is either a way to turn all that off (or better a way to selectively turn parts of it off) or a separate camera app available that lets you do that. It's the future. Something hit your self-driving hover car and left a small dent. To get your insurance to pay for fixing the dent you have to send them a photo. Your camera AI sees the dent as messing up the composition and removes it. Your insurance company is Google Insurance (it's the future...Google ran out of social media and content delivery ideas to try for a while and suddenly abandon so they had to branch out to find new areas to try and then abandon). Google's insurance AI won't approve the claim because the photo shows no damage, and it is Google so you can't reach a human to help.
- bitcurious 4y ago
  > Reality is what we remember it to be. We can have a better reality easily ;) Cue Paris Syndrome, because expectations will also be of a better reality. Then you go somewhere, and eat something, and experience the mess that actually exists everywhere before some AI removed it from the record. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
madaxe_again 4y ago
This is just a progression of the nature of our human world - we have been replacing reality with the hyperreal for millennia, and the pace only accelerates. The map is the territory. Korzybski was right, but Baudrillard even more so.
herval 4y ago
It's sorta like this already, in the _present_ - people post photos with filters all the time, smart phone cameras color-correct and sharpen everything with AI (not just Samsung's). It'll just become more and more commonplace
- omoikane 4y ago
  The problem is that this particular AI enhancement was not advertised as such. Also, in the linked article it was putting moon texture on ping pong balls, which seemed like overzealous application of AI. Samsung could have marketed it as "moon enhancement AI" or something like that, which would be more honest. My worry about these features becoming commonplace is that if everyone just leave those features enabled, we would end up with many boring photos because they all look similar to each other. The current set of photo filters, even though they seem to be converging on particular looks, at least don't seem to invent as much detail as pasting a moon that's not there.
  - nomel 4y ago
    I don’t understand why “AI” is even required for any of this, other than classification. Once classified as “the moon” the GPS and time, from the phone, could be used for a lookup table to a 10 gigapixel rendering, at the correct orientation, using NASA scans. It seems like a moon AI would give much worse results.
pmoriarty 4y ago
Why would we even need photos when we can hallucinate it all?
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Can't grow cameras.
formerly_proven 4y ago
"Good sensors are expensive"-fun-fact: Mid-range CCTV cameras often have bigger sensors (1/1.8" or 1/1.2") and much faster lenses than an iPhone 13 Pro Max (1/1.9" for the main camera). The CCTV camera package is of course far bigger though. But still kinda funny in a way. Edit: And the lenses on these are not your granddads computar 3-8/1.0, either. Most of the CCTV footage we see just comes from old, sometimes even analog, and lowest-bidder installations.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
aceazzameen 4y ago
I still argue that my Galaxy Note 8 took cleaner pictures in general than my Galaxy Note 20. Everything feels overly processed, even in "pro" mode with all processing settings turned off.
gostsamo 4y ago
Bruce Sterling I think had a story in that direction. A polaroid camera producer would develop photos which would've been algorithmically enhanced so that their clients consider themselves better photographers and their cameras superior. I'm regularly updated for it for the last few years when cameras are more and more their software. Edit: fixed the author's name. Cannot find the exact story though.
- stubish 4y ago
  This has in some ways been happening for decades. There are a few countries where the way to take a good portrait of a person is to over expose the photo, so skin tones are lighter. People bought the cameras and phones that did this by default (by accident or design in the 'portrait mode' settings). They didn't want realism.
DeathArrow 4y ago
Let's hope AI won't replace people faces with wrong ones.
- flangola7 4y ago
  https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machine-learning-tool-pulse-stylegan-obama-bias https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin...
phpisthebest 4y ago
I would be more concerned with the impact on criminal system as more and more both defense and prosecution is dependent on cell phone camera data... It is all faked by AI well.....
- Jensson 4y ago
  I wonder when the AI will hallucinate a gun into a black persons hand since the training black people often had guns? Hands moving fast are really blurry, so it has to hallucinate a lot, so it doesn't seem impossible. I could see that becoming a scandal of the century.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
    You (partly) joke but I do recall a recent shooting trial in which there was a lot of arguments about an "enhanced" or zoomed image and what was really in it.
its-summertime 4y ago
> Sensor quality in phones goes down, AI makes up for it Why do you think the stock camera apps usually get better results? How could a phone's smaller-than-a-thumbnail lens setup ever get as much light as a proper camera's?
MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
I wonder if that'll ever cause legal problems in the future. Sorry, that photo someone took where the accused was in background at a party some years ago? He was kinda blurry and those facial features have been enhanced with AI, that evidence will have to be thrown out. Or maybe the photo is of you, and you need it as an alibi..
- Grambo 4y ago
  This is actually exactly what happened during the Kyle Rittenhouse case. A lawyer for the defense tried to question video evidence because of AI being used to enhance zoomed shots.
  - dtx1 4y ago
    No that was what the mainstream media lied to you about what happened in the rittenhouse case. One of several instances where one could see fake news and straight up lies be spread in real time. What actually happened was that a police officer testified that using pinch to zoom on his iPhone he saw kyle point his rifle at the first person assaulting him. Mind you we were talking about a cluster of around 5px. The state wanted to use an iPad to show the jury using pinch to zoom that same "evidence" because using proper zooming without an unknown interpolator algorithm the defense using an expert witness showed that this was not the case. No one in that courtroom understood the difference between linear and bicubic interpolation. The defense did not understand it either so they tried to explain to the judge that the iPad Might use AI to interpolate pixels that aren't there and that the jury should only use the properly scaled video the court provided not an ad hoc pinch to zoom version in an iPad with unknown interpolation. Thankfully the judge told the state to fuck off with their iPad but the mainstream media used the bad explanation of the defense against kyle when the reality was that the state basically tried to fake evidence live on stream using an iPad to zoom in. BTW I'm German so I don't have a horse in the political race but I watched the Trial on live stream and saw the fake news come out while watching
    - cwilkes 4y ago
      The story isn’t “the state tried to fake” but rather the defense tried to get thrown out any image taken by a non analog camera as AI could have added detail where there is none.
RobotToaster 4y ago
That isn't far from how iphones work now. They have mediocre cameras, people only think they are good because they throw a lot of AI image enhancement at it.
- worrycue 4y ago
  Is Apple’s AI adding hallucinated details? The last I read it’s just used to merge multiple images - up to 8 or 9 images - to form the final image. While I could see details getting lost or artifacts being added, I don’t think it can add actual “feature” details that don’t exist.
  - ezst 4y ago
    It already does some amount of features detection and targetted enhancing. Things like making this face smoother, or this sky bluer, or this grass greener, etc. From there, I wouldn't be too surprised if some details get added beyond what was strictly captured (e.g. bubbles in drinks, leaves in trees, …)
time0ut 4y ago
I was thinking of a scenario. My children are adults and browsing photos of themselves as children. They come across a picture of the family on a vacation to the beach. They dimly remember it, but the memories are fond. They notice they are holding crisp ice cold cans of Coca Cola Classic (tm). They don’t remember that part very well. Mom and dad rarely let them drink Coke. Maybe it was a special occasion. You know what, maybe it would be fun to pick up some Coke to share with their kids! So a future where reality and history are subtly tweaked to the specifications of those willing to pay…
- dellamonica 4y ago
  That would make a great Black Mirror episode... and a terrible dystopia if it becomes reality.
- geodel 4y ago
  These scenarios were much talked about a decade back in relation to advertising on photographs on Facebook, specially with Coca Cola and other popular brands.
- zirgs 4y ago
  Google already scans your photos folder and offers enhancements, stitches together panoramas and so on. So inserting product placement is totally believable.
moremetadata 4y ago
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wakeupcall 4y ago
I don't already fully trust the images, audio and videos I take with the phone. I'm working close to HW and I actively use the camera/picture and videos for future reference and debugging. It's small, fits in your pocket, and the bloody thing can record at 240fps to booth! Until you realize there's so much post-processing done on the images, video and audio you can't really trust and can't really know if you can turn it all off. The reality is that if you could, you'd realize there's no free lunch. It's a small sensor, and while we had huge improvements in sensor and small lenses, it's still a small sensor. Did the smoothing/compression remove details? Did the multi-shot remove or add motion artifacts you wanted to see? Has noise-cancelling removed or altered frequencies? Is the high-frame rate real, interpolated, or anything inbetween depending on light just to make it look nice? In the end, they're consumer devices. "Does it look good -> yes" is what thrums everything in this market. Expect the worst.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > Did the smoothing/compression remove details? Did the multi-shot remove or add motion artifacts you wanted to see? Has noise-cancelling removed or altered frequencies? Is the high-frame rate real, interpolated, or anything inbetween depending on light just to make it look nice? This has been true of consumer digital cameras for 25 years. It's not new to or exclusive to smartphone cameras. It's not even exclusive to consumer cameras as professional ones costing many times more also do a bunch of image processing before anything is committed to disk.
  - kuschku 4y ago
    With even an a6000 (you can get it used for about 200 bucks) you can get high quality RAW images without any postprocessing. And they actually look good! No phone can deliver that, even today.
    - castella 4y ago
      Granted, there isn't the ridiculous amount of postprocessing we see in phones, but even many dedicated cameras these days don't give you an actual raw sensor dump in their so-called RAW files. Sony is probably the worst offender here actually. The a6x00 series applies lossy (!) compression to every RAW file without any option to disable, and there's an additional noise filter on long exposures that wreaks havoc on astrophotography: https://stephenbayphotography.com/blog/sony-raw-compression-artifacts-real-examples/ https://stephenbayphotography.com/blog/sony-raw-compression-... http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/SonyA7S/sonystareater.html http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/SonyA7S/sonystareater...
sowbug 4y ago
I don't know if you even need AI for this. "You just took a picture of the Eiffel Tower. We searched our database and found 2.4 million public pictures taken from the same location and time of day. Here are 30,000 photos that are identical to yours, except better. Would you like to delete yours and use one of them instead?"
- dylan604 4y ago
  royalty free I'd assume you meant as well, or are you pitching a new SaaS model for stock photos?
  - sowbug 4y ago
    Haha, the idea's all yours. Let me know how it goes.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      'cause, yeah, what the world needs is YASIS, yet another stock imagery something. i'm way too outside the SV bubble to be affected by its reality distortion field to think that would be a good idea.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    This is probably one of the few good things about current meltdown and no low rates. No more silly Peletoneque startups. edit: for a while anyway
    - dylan604 4y ago
      I find myself sometimes wondering with things like Peleton and Juicero, what would happen if Ron Popeil was born a couple decades later so he had access to the same VC those companies did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Popeil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Popeil
    - isaacremuant 4y ago
      I think they'll just use AI/GPT Hype and sell whatever next hypegrowth based on flimsy evidence they can. The current narrative in financial places seems to be 2023 is gone but 2024 comes with a vengeance, feel safe investing, your real estate will grow in value! We're making people go back to the office so that it does! More lemmings! Less quality! More production! Yes. I'm peak cynical after 3 years of self made economic destruction only to tell those who didn't cause it that "of course they must pay for the broken plates".
thecupisblue 4y ago
Now, imagine this future: You got a friend, spouse or someone close that has hundreds of pictures of you on their phone. Their phone has a "AI chip" that is used to finetune the recognition models and photo models with your AI library. Like Google Photos tags images of people you know, so does the model. It also helps sharpen images - you moved your head in an image and it was a bit blurry, but the model just fixed it, because like the original model had for the moon, it has hundreds of pictures of you to compensate. One day, that person witnesses a robbery. They try and take a photo of the robber, but the algorithm determines it was you on the photo and fixes it up to apply your face. Congratulations, you are now a robber.
- theptip 4y ago
  It seems fairly easy to bake a chain of custody into your images. Sensor outputs a signed raw image, AI outputs a different signed “touched up” image. We can afford to keep both in this hypothetical future; use whichever one you want. Once generative AI really takes off we will need some system for unambiguously proving where an image/video came from; the solution is quite obvious in this case and many have sketched it already.
  - jfim 4y ago
    Until some PM says "why do we have both images, our data shows that 99.5% of users don't use the raw image, let's remove that feature."
    - theptip 4y ago
      And the answer is “spam filters and AI personal curation agents will drop any image without chain of custody from every feed that claims to be about reality”. In a world where any image or video can be generated, chain of custody to a real-world ground-truth will be vitally important.
      - JeremyBanks 4y ago
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Frost1x 4y ago
Something I learned long ago is that people typically don't want the truth, in general. They want fictional lies, they crave a false reality that makes them happy. Reality in and of itself, for most, is an utter drag if they're made constantly aware of it and dwell on it. When it comes to marketing, people eat up the propoganda techniques. They want to be fed this amazing thing even if it's not really all too amazing. They love that it tickles their reward center in the process. This of course isn't always the case. When something is really important or significant people sometimes do want to know the truth as best they can. I want to know the car I'm purchasing isn't a lemon, I want to know the home I'm buying isn't a money pit, I want the doctor to to tell me if my health is good or bad (for some, under the condition the information is actionable), and so on. When it comes to more frivolous things, for many, build the fantasy, sell them that farm to table meal you harvested from the dew drops this morning and hand cooked with the story of your suffering to Michelin star chef and how you're saving my local community by homing puppies from the local animal shelter with profits... even if you took something frozen, slapped it in the microwave and plated it and just donate $10 a month to your local animal shelter where you visited twice to create a pool of photos to market. For many, they want and crave the fantasy. Progress made by science and tech has, for a brief fragment of history, established techniques and made practical, in some cases, to peel away all or at least some layers of fantasy away to reality. We started to pierce into cold hard reality and separate the signal of truth, as we can best understand it, from all the noise of ignorance and fantasy. For many fantasy lovers, snakeoil salesmen, and con men, pulling away the veil of fantasy and noise has been a threat and there's been a consistent battle to undermine those efforts. The whole emergence and perpetuation of misinformation and recent "fake news" trends are just some of the latest popular approaches. We've been seeding our knowledge and information more recently with increasing degrees of falsehoods and pure fabrications. Now, enter "AI," especially generative flavors. The same people who wanted to undermine truth are foaming at the mouth at the current ability to produce vast amounts of noise that in some cases are almost indistinguishable from reality from current techniques we have. Not only that, fantasy lovers en masse are excited at the new level of fantasy they can be sold. They really really don't care or want the truth. They really do just want "a good looking picture", "to make the summary interesting", or just see some neat picture. They don't care how accurate it is. Now people interested in the truth are facing a deluge of technologically enabled difficult to seperate noise production. Is what I'm looking at close to reality? How many layers of noise are there I should consider when interpreting this piece of information? In the past, the layers used to be pretty managable, they were largely physical limitations or resource limitations to falsify the data to a point that couldn't be easily discerned. These days... it's becoming increasingly difficult to determine this and more and more information in various forms are leveraging more sophisticated and believable noise production. Technology has made this affordable to the masses and there are many parties with interest in setting the clock back to a world where the best story tellers are looked at as the oracles of modern time. People often scoff at ChatGPT that it seeds or "hallucinates" to interpolate and extrapolate gaps of knowledge and make connections but it does so in a way that people like. It projects confidence, certainty, and in many cases it gives exactly what people want. To me, it's scary because it's providing a service the majority seem to want and creating an onslaught of noise that's more costly to debunk than it is to produce.
azatom 4y ago
"Do you believe for your own eyes, or what I say!?" The future is BigCorp's AI will censure your photo when you try to take picture like on tiananmen square massacre. I want a photo, not even sharpend.
xwdv 4y ago
But it won’t end there. Eventually people won’t care much for clarity and precision, that’s boring. The real problem is that everything that can be photographed will eventually have been photographed in all kinds of ways. What people really want is just pictures that look more awesome, in ways other people haven’t seen before. So instead, raw photos will be little more than prompts that get fed to an AI that “reimagines” the image to be wildly different, using impossible or impractical perspectives, lighting, deleted crowds, anything you can imagine, even fantasy elements like massive planets in the sky or strange critters scurrying about. And thus, cameras will be more like having your own personal painter in your pocket, painting impressions of places you visit, making them far more interesting than you remember and delighting your followers with unique content. Worlds of pure imagination.
- zirgs 4y ago
  You can already do that with AI art generators right now. Can either generate images from scratch using prompts or enhancre existing images.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    It’s in a cloud, not on your phone.
    - zirgs 4y ago
      They managed to run it on a phone: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2023/02/worlds-first-on-device-demonstration-of-stable-diffusion-on-android https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2023/02/worlds-first-on-de...
      - xwdv 4y ago
        Ok so we just have to wait for society to get to the point where they care about images more than photographs.
pessimizer 4y ago
We already have people demanding higher definition televisions to watch AI-sharpened 4K restorations of old films whose grain and focus would annihilate any details that small worth seeing. There's an arms race between people adding nonexistent details to old films and people manufacturing televisions with dense enough pixels to render those microscopic fictions. Then they lay a filter over it all and everything becomes smooth gradients with perfectly sharp edges.
Wistar 4y ago
The evidentiary value of photography will plummet.
rhaway84773 4y ago
If (when?) we start replacing mirrors with cameras and a screen, it’s possible we may go through life entirely without knowing what we look like.
- Rexxar 4y ago
  It's already somewhat the case with mirrors as we always see the symmetry of our real image.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  And everybody's body image improves as they only know the idealized version of themselves, but see the real version of their meatspace acquaintances. In the other hand, there will likely be a market for makeup mirrors that emphasize your flaws (both to help the user and to sell more product)
krona 4y ago
What you're imagining is Hyperreality from Simulacra and Simulation and has been happening since the invention of the television, and later the internet. AI will accelerate this process exponentially and just like in The Matrix, most people will eventually prefer the simulation to reality itself.
modeless 4y ago
People want this. It's already happening. There was a post on the Stable Diffusion reddit where someone ran a picture of their grandparents through it to colorize and make it "look nicer". But it made significant changes to their clothes and hallucinated some jewelry they weren't wearing, along with some subtle changes in the faces. It's not real anymore, but hey it looks nicer right?
- astrange 4y ago
  ControlNet already fixed that, you can constrain it to change colors and nothing else.
KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
I think the limitations are in optics and the signal processing stack, rather than the CMOS sensor. A better lens can go a long way.
cratermoon 4y ago
> hallucinated <soapbox>confabulated</soapbox>
marzell 4y ago
If we aren't already living in a simulation, then we've begun a feedback loop so that in the near future, we very well may be.
kurthr 4y ago
Oh man... I thought you were going to, "the stop signs and strip malls were how we discovered there were aliens on the Moon (and Mars) that look exactly like us!". Of course they would have perfect skin and expertly applied eye-liner and lipstick as well.
kugelblitz 4y ago
Reminds me of that CCC talk by David Kriesel https://youtu.be/zXXmhxbQ-hk https://youtu.be/zXXmhxbQ-hk "Don't trust any scan that you didn't falsify yourself" A "smart" scanner tries to compress images.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
The novelty of things like instagram is wearing off. I see more people not bothering to pull out their phone. It's not just wanting to compete with the photos taken by narcissist on the internet, it's also just losing interest, and knowing things you share can and will be used against you.
ochoseis 4y ago
Or, you know, Samsung sells ad placements in the enhanced images to do things like turn a can of Coke into a can of Pepsi, overwrite billboards in the background, etc.
user3939382 4y ago
I made a post about exactly this feedback loop wrt ChatGPT and it got no attention outside of one comment dismissing my point.
jlengrand 4y ago
Quite the equivalent (to me) to many kids preferring the taste of "strawberry yoghurt" compared to real strawberries, because it's sweeter and has enhanced taste. Except for photos. Not sure I like that future
kfrzcode 4y ago
"future?"
basch 4y ago
This will be the next step in film “restorations” too. A combination of ai models trained on high resolution textures and objects, models of the actors, and training from every frame of the movie that cal use the textures and geometry from multiple angles and cameras to “reconstruct” lost detail.
HyperSane 4y ago
This is actually making me want to start using film again because it is so much harder to fake.
HyperSane 4y ago
There is going to be a nasty feedback loop of AI being trained on its own output that will probably cause improvement to plateau.
c3534l 4y ago
I've seen this with CGI. CGI still looks awful somehow, but people about my age think it looks cinematic, and people a decade younger think it looks incredibly realistic.
gehwartzen 4y ago
I’ve always thought this was the final outcome of all AI; a feedback loop. Same when ChatGPT starts using things ChatGPT wrote itself as references to train itself.
jklinger410 4y ago
> This faked data, submitted by users as "real pics in real places" is further used to train AI models I am begging people to find a new gotcha for AI other than "training it on data created by itself or other AI." It's an obvious issue with obvious solutions. If it happens, it will be due to ignorance. It is not inevitable, and it shouldn't even be likely.

cjsawyer 4y ago

This is my exact worry with things like chat gpt polluting the scrapable internet. The feedback loop might eventually ruin whatever value the models currently have by filling them with incorrect but plentiful generated nonsense.

dusted 4y ago

Basically this.. As "neat" as AI "improvement" is, I don't think it has any actual value, I can't come up with any use-case where I can accept it. "Make pictures look good by just hallucinating stuff" is one of the harder ones to explain, but you did it well.. Another thing, pictures for proof and documentation, maybe not when they're taken but after the fact, for historical reasons, or forensics.. We can't have every picture automatically compromised as soon as it's taken. (Yes, I know that photoshop is a thing, but that's a very deliberate action, which I believe it should be)

jfengel 4y ago
I think the main use case is "I'm a crummy photographer and all I want is something to remind me that I was there" and "Look at my cat. Look! Look at her!" That's me. I'm a lousy photographer, as evidenced by all of the photos I shot back when film actually recorded what you pointed it at. My photography has been vastly improved by AI. It hasn't yet reached the point of "No, you idiot, don't take a picture of that. Go left. Left! Ya know what, I'm just gonna make something up," but it should. I imagine there will remain a use case for people who can actually compose good shots. For the remaining 99% of us, we'll use "Send the camera on vacation and stay home; it's cheaper and produces better pictures" mode.
- mysterydip 4y ago
  That would actually be a useful feature, I'm aiming the camera but based on what makes "good professional" photos, it suggests "move to the left so you frame the picture well" or "those two people should be more spread out so its not one person with two heads" etc, kindof like lane warnings on cars.
- Kye 4y ago
  I'm a decent photographer and still use my phone for this. It's good enough, and can even skip the AI stuff if I want to. Or even better: I can keep the AI stuff in the raw and edit its impact on the final photo later.
- b112 4y ago
  "I'm a crummy photographer and all I want is something to remind me that I was there" This is fine, and I can take good shots but at the same time? I only care about this level of shot most of the time too! But then instead of a 20MP image, which: * takes more space, and ergo, more flash drive space * more space to store, to backup, to send * is made 20MP by inserting fake data Why not have a 2MP image, which is real, and let people's end-use device "fix" it? Because all that post processing can be done when 2x or 4x the view size, too! Because advertising. And that's sad. We'd rather think we have a better pic, and destroy the original. And the space thing is real. Because, that same pic gets stored in gmail with 20 people, backed up, kept in all the devices, and so on! And the LOL of it all, is that I bet when it is uploaded to facebook... it gets downsized! edit: in fact, my email app allows me to resize on email, so I downsize that too! Oh, those poor electrons.

spion 4y ago

I like the story, but I think people will notice pretty quickly as almost everyone reviews their photos right after taking them (so they can compare them with what they see in reality)

whatisthiseven 4y ago
True, its just a fun story. This reddit post makes it clear, though, that while people will review the images carefully, they may still not be able to accurately determine differences. Just take the story above with one more minor step: You snap a pic of the park, briefly glanced at it to make sure it wasn't blurry (which the AI would have fixed anyway) or had an ugly glare (it did, the AI fixed it) or worse a finger (the AI also fixed that). You're satisfied the image was captured faithfully and you did a good job holding your plastic rectangle to capture unseen sights. You didn't look closely enough to notice all the faked details, because they were so good. This fake moon super enhance? It already proves people will fall for it. I could easily see people not realizing AI turned the flowers in the picture more red, or the grass just a little too green, etc.
- janalsncm 4y ago
  People will quickly see that their faces don’t look right. That’s usually the first thing they look at.
  - whatisthiseven 4y ago
    Faces are definitely harder. The story has to get stretched a lot to imagine a total dystopia, but its possible. People like digital mirrors for all their benefits: lighter, more features, music and weather all on one "mirror". You can have voice chats, see how you might look with various makeup/styles/haircuts. This digital mirror gets so popular, and (undermining myself here a bit) high enough quality, that people want these new cool wall screens instead. And you betcha, AI is of course going to be added. Take insta pics without needing to hold a phone, then apply filters all in one with your voice! Some people take dozens of photos, forgetting briefly how they look. Now, people are used to every day seeing themselves in the digital mirror with minor touchups for how they would look if they used some sponsored makeup. They used to do it daily so it would match, but kept forgetting as it always showed the improved version (with a small icon saying, you are 40% matched to the predicted image!). Some 20-something walking around in Chicago passes The Bean, and realizes they don't look quite the same as they did in their home mirror. They take out their phone to take a pic of themselves, which is of course synced to their mirror with the same "makeup enhancement suggestions", still warning them it doesn't match. They put away their phone, confident in the knowledge The Bean is just a dirty and distorted mirror, which is why they don't look as good. The camera has always been trustworthy. Why doubt it today? (again, fun story, I don't think this is likely. Just plausible for some people).

wefarrell 4y ago

I can imagine there will be a lot more “ghost” pictures like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghosts/comments/11jvwy4/after_years_of_hearing_noises_from_the_kitchen_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghosts/comments/11jvwy4/after_years... as AI tries to infer images of people where they aren’t really present.

marcus_holmes 4y ago

Or better, the AI improves your shitty snapshots so they come out great. Every shot is beautifully framed, perfect composition, correct light balance, worthy of a master photographer. You can point your camera any old way at a thing and the resulting photo will be a masterpiece. The details don't quite correspond to reality; to get the framing right the AI inserted a tree branch where there wasn't one, or moved that pillar to the left to get the composition lined up. But who care? Gorgeous photo, right? And the thing is, I don't think anyone would care. You'd get the odd weird comparison where two people take a photo of the same place and it looks different for each of them. And you'd lose the ability to use the collected photos of humanity to map the world properly. I think it's fascinating. Reality is what we remember it to be. We can have a better reality easily ;)

tzs 4y ago
That could be fine as long as there is either a way to turn all that off (or better a way to selectively turn parts of it off) or a separate camera app available that lets you do that. It's the future. Something hit your self-driving hover car and left a small dent. To get your insurance to pay for fixing the dent you have to send them a photo. Your camera AI sees the dent as messing up the composition and removes it. Your insurance company is Google Insurance (it's the future...Google ran out of social media and content delivery ideas to try for a while and suddenly abandon so they had to branch out to find new areas to try and then abandon). Google's insurance AI won't approve the claim because the photo shows no damage, and it is Google so you can't reach a human to help.
bitcurious 4y ago
> Reality is what we remember it to be. We can have a better reality easily ;) Cue Paris Syndrome, because expectations will also be of a better reality. Then you go somewhere, and eat something, and experience the mess that actually exists everywhere before some AI removed it from the record. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome

madaxe_again 4y ago

This is just a progression of the nature of our human world - we have been replacing reality with the hyperreal for millennia, and the pace only accelerates. The map is the territory. Korzybski was right, but Baudrillard even more so.

herval 4y ago

It's sorta like this already, in the _present_ - people post photos with filters all the time, smart phone cameras color-correct and sharpen everything with AI (not just Samsung's). It'll just become more and more commonplace

omoikane 4y ago
The problem is that this particular AI enhancement was not advertised as such. Also, in the linked article it was putting moon texture on ping pong balls, which seemed like overzealous application of AI. Samsung could have marketed it as "moon enhancement AI" or something like that, which would be more honest. My worry about these features becoming commonplace is that if everyone just leave those features enabled, we would end up with many boring photos because they all look similar to each other. The current set of photo filters, even though they seem to be converging on particular looks, at least don't seem to invent as much detail as pasting a moon that's not there.
- nomel 4y ago
  I don’t understand why “AI” is even required for any of this, other than classification. Once classified as “the moon” the GPS and time, from the phone, could be used for a lookup table to a 10 gigapixel rendering, at the correct orientation, using NASA scans. It seems like a moon AI would give much worse results.

pmoriarty 4y ago

Why would we even need photos when we can hallucinate it all?

InCityDreams 4y ago
Can't grow cameras.

formerly_proven 4y ago

"Good sensors are expensive"-fun-fact: Mid-range CCTV cameras often have bigger sensors (1/1.8" or 1/1.2") and much faster lenses than an iPhone 13 Pro Max (1/1.9" for the main camera). The CCTV camera package is of course far bigger though. But still kinda funny in a way. Edit: And the lenses on these are not your granddads computar 3-8/1.0, either. Most of the CCTV footage we see just comes from old, sometimes even analog, and lowest-bidder installations.

deleted 4y ago
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aceazzameen 4y ago

I still argue that my Galaxy Note 8 took cleaner pictures in general than my Galaxy Note 20. Everything feels overly processed, even in "pro" mode with all processing settings turned off.

gostsamo 4y ago

Bruce Sterling I think had a story in that direction. A polaroid camera producer would develop photos which would've been algorithmically enhanced so that their clients consider themselves better photographers and their cameras superior. I'm regularly updated for it for the last few years when cameras are more and more their software. Edit: fixed the author's name. Cannot find the exact story though.

stubish 4y ago
This has in some ways been happening for decades. There are a few countries where the way to take a good portrait of a person is to over expose the photo, so skin tones are lighter. People bought the cameras and phones that did this by default (by accident or design in the 'portrait mode' settings). They didn't want realism.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Let's hope AI won't replace people faces with wrong ones.

flangola7 4y ago
https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machine-learning-tool-pulse-stylegan-obama-bias https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-machin...

phpisthebest 4y ago

I would be more concerned with the impact on criminal system as more and more both defense and prosecution is dependent on cell phone camera data... It is all faked by AI well.....

Jensson 4y ago
I wonder when the AI will hallucinate a gun into a black persons hand since the training black people often had guns? Hands moving fast are really blurry, so it has to hallucinate a lot, so it doesn't seem impossible. I could see that becoming a scandal of the century.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
  You (partly) joke but I do recall a recent shooting trial in which there was a lot of arguments about an "enhanced" or zoomed image and what was really in it.

its-summertime 4y ago

> Sensor quality in phones goes down, AI makes up for it Why do you think the stock camera apps usually get better results? How could a phone's smaller-than-a-thumbnail lens setup ever get as much light as a proper camera's?

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago

I wonder if that'll ever cause legal problems in the future. Sorry, that photo someone took where the accused was in background at a party some years ago? He was kinda blurry and those facial features have been enhanced with AI, that evidence will have to be thrown out. Or maybe the photo is of you, and you need it as an alibi..

Grambo 4y ago
This is actually exactly what happened during the Kyle Rittenhouse case. A lawyer for the defense tried to question video evidence because of AI being used to enhance zoomed shots.
- dtx1 4y ago
  No that was what the mainstream media lied to you about what happened in the rittenhouse case. One of several instances where one could see fake news and straight up lies be spread in real time. What actually happened was that a police officer testified that using pinch to zoom on his iPhone he saw kyle point his rifle at the first person assaulting him. Mind you we were talking about a cluster of around 5px. The state wanted to use an iPad to show the jury using pinch to zoom that same "evidence" because using proper zooming without an unknown interpolator algorithm the defense using an expert witness showed that this was not the case. No one in that courtroom understood the difference between linear and bicubic interpolation. The defense did not understand it either so they tried to explain to the judge that the iPad Might use AI to interpolate pixels that aren't there and that the jury should only use the properly scaled video the court provided not an ad hoc pinch to zoom version in an iPad with unknown interpolation. Thankfully the judge told the state to fuck off with their iPad but the mainstream media used the bad explanation of the defense against kyle when the reality was that the state basically tried to fake evidence live on stream using an iPad to zoom in. BTW I'm German so I don't have a horse in the political race but I watched the Trial on live stream and saw the fake news come out while watching
  - cwilkes 4y ago
    The story isn’t “the state tried to fake” but rather the defense tried to get thrown out any image taken by a non analog camera as AI could have added detail where there is none.

RobotToaster 4y ago

That isn't far from how iphones work now. They have mediocre cameras, people only think they are good because they throw a lot of AI image enhancement at it.

worrycue 4y ago
Is Apple’s AI adding hallucinated details? The last I read it’s just used to merge multiple images - up to 8 or 9 images - to form the final image. While I could see details getting lost or artifacts being added, I don’t think it can add actual “feature” details that don’t exist.
- ezst 4y ago
  It already does some amount of features detection and targetted enhancing. Things like making this face smoother, or this sky bluer, or this grass greener, etc. From there, I wouldn't be too surprised if some details get added beyond what was strictly captured (e.g. bubbles in drinks, leaves in trees, …)

time0ut 4y ago

I was thinking of a scenario. My children are adults and browsing photos of themselves as children. They come across a picture of the family on a vacation to the beach. They dimly remember it, but the memories are fond. They notice they are holding crisp ice cold cans of Coca Cola Classic (tm). They don’t remember that part very well. Mom and dad rarely let them drink Coke. Maybe it was a special occasion. You know what, maybe it would be fun to pick up some Coke to share with their kids! So a future where reality and history are subtly tweaked to the specifications of those willing to pay…

dellamonica 4y ago
That would make a great Black Mirror episode... and a terrible dystopia if it becomes reality.
geodel 4y ago
These scenarios were much talked about a decade back in relation to advertising on photographs on Facebook, specially with Coca Cola and other popular brands.
zirgs 4y ago
Google already scans your photos folder and offers enhancements, stitches together panoramas and so on. So inserting product placement is totally believable.

moremetadata 4y ago

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wakeupcall 4y ago

I don't already fully trust the images, audio and videos I take with the phone. I'm working close to HW and I actively use the camera/picture and videos for future reference and debugging. It's small, fits in your pocket, and the bloody thing can record at 240fps to booth! Until you realize there's so much post-processing done on the images, video and audio you can't really trust and can't really know if you can turn it all off. The reality is that if you could, you'd realize there's no free lunch. It's a small sensor, and while we had huge improvements in sensor and small lenses, it's still a small sensor. Did the smoothing/compression remove details? Did the multi-shot remove or add motion artifacts you wanted to see? Has noise-cancelling removed or altered frequencies? Is the high-frame rate real, interpolated, or anything inbetween depending on light just to make it look nice? In the end, they're consumer devices. "Does it look good -> yes" is what thrums everything in this market. Expect the worst.

giantrobot 4y ago
> Did the smoothing/compression remove details? Did the multi-shot remove or add motion artifacts you wanted to see? Has noise-cancelling removed or altered frequencies? Is the high-frame rate real, interpolated, or anything inbetween depending on light just to make it look nice? This has been true of consumer digital cameras for 25 years. It's not new to or exclusive to smartphone cameras. It's not even exclusive to consumer cameras as professional ones costing many times more also do a bunch of image processing before anything is committed to disk.
- kuschku 4y ago
  With even an a6000 (you can get it used for about 200 bucks) you can get high quality RAW images without any postprocessing. And they actually look good! No phone can deliver that, even today.
  - castella 4y ago
    Granted, there isn't the ridiculous amount of postprocessing we see in phones, but even many dedicated cameras these days don't give you an actual raw sensor dump in their so-called RAW files. Sony is probably the worst offender here actually. The a6x00 series applies lossy (!) compression to every RAW file without any option to disable, and there's an additional noise filter on long exposures that wreaks havoc on astrophotography: https://stephenbayphotography.com/blog/sony-raw-compression-artifacts-real-examples/ https://stephenbayphotography.com/blog/sony-raw-compression-... http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/SonyA7S/sonystareater.html http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/SonyA7S/sonystareater...

sowbug 4y ago

I don't know if you even need AI for this. "You just took a picture of the Eiffel Tower. We searched our database and found 2.4 million public pictures taken from the same location and time of day. Here are 30,000 photos that are identical to yours, except better. Would you like to delete yours and use one of them instead?"

dylan604 4y ago
royalty free I'd assume you meant as well, or are you pitching a new SaaS model for stock photos?
- sowbug 4y ago
  Haha, the idea's all yours. Let me know how it goes.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    'cause, yeah, what the world needs is YASIS, yet another stock imagery something. i'm way too outside the SV bubble to be affected by its reality distortion field to think that would be a good idea.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  This is probably one of the few good things about current meltdown and no low rates. No more silly Peletoneque startups. edit: for a while anyway
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I find myself sometimes wondering with things like Peleton and Juicero, what would happen if Ron Popeil was born a couple decades later so he had access to the same VC those companies did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Popeil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Popeil
  - isaacremuant 4y ago
    I think they'll just use AI/GPT Hype and sell whatever next hypegrowth based on flimsy evidence they can. The current narrative in financial places seems to be 2023 is gone but 2024 comes with a vengeance, feel safe investing, your real estate will grow in value! We're making people go back to the office so that it does! More lemmings! Less quality! More production! Yes. I'm peak cynical after 3 years of self made economic destruction only to tell those who didn't cause it that "of course they must pay for the broken plates".

thecupisblue 4y ago

Now, imagine this future: You got a friend, spouse or someone close that has hundreds of pictures of you on their phone. Their phone has a "AI chip" that is used to finetune the recognition models and photo models with your AI library. Like Google Photos tags images of people you know, so does the model. It also helps sharpen images - you moved your head in an image and it was a bit blurry, but the model just fixed it, because like the original model had for the moon, it has hundreds of pictures of you to compensate. One day, that person witnesses a robbery. They try and take a photo of the robber, but the algorithm determines it was you on the photo and fixes it up to apply your face. Congratulations, you are now a robber.

theptip 4y ago
It seems fairly easy to bake a chain of custody into your images. Sensor outputs a signed raw image, AI outputs a different signed “touched up” image. We can afford to keep both in this hypothetical future; use whichever one you want. Once generative AI really takes off we will need some system for unambiguously proving where an image/video came from; the solution is quite obvious in this case and many have sketched it already.
- jfim 4y ago
  Until some PM says "why do we have both images, our data shows that 99.5% of users don't use the raw image, let's remove that feature."
  - theptip 4y ago
    And the answer is “spam filters and AI personal curation agents will drop any image without chain of custody from every feed that claims to be about reality”. In a world where any image or video can be generated, chain of custody to a real-world ground-truth will be vitally important.
    - JeremyBanks 4y ago
      [dead]

Frost1x 4y ago

Something I learned long ago is that people typically don't want the truth, in general. They want fictional lies, they crave a false reality that makes them happy. Reality in and of itself, for most, is an utter drag if they're made constantly aware of it and dwell on it. When it comes to marketing, people eat up the propoganda techniques. They want to be fed this amazing thing even if it's not really all too amazing. They love that it tickles their reward center in the process. This of course isn't always the case. When something is really important or significant people sometimes do want to know the truth as best they can. I want to know the car I'm purchasing isn't a lemon, I want to know the home I'm buying isn't a money pit, I want the doctor to to tell me if my health is good or bad (for some, under the condition the information is actionable), and so on. When it comes to more frivolous things, for many, build the fantasy, sell them that farm to table meal you harvested from the dew drops this morning and hand cooked with the story of your suffering to Michelin star chef and how you're saving my local community by homing puppies from the local animal shelter with profits... even if you took something frozen, slapped it in the microwave and plated it and just donate $10 a month to your local animal shelter where you visited twice to create a pool of photos to market. For many, they want and crave the fantasy. Progress made by science and tech has, for a brief fragment of history, established techniques and made practical, in some cases, to peel away all or at least some layers of fantasy away to reality. We started to pierce into cold hard reality and separate the signal of truth, as we can best understand it, from all the noise of ignorance and fantasy. For many fantasy lovers, snakeoil salesmen, and con men, pulling away the veil of fantasy and noise has been a threat and there's been a consistent battle to undermine those efforts. The whole emergence and perpetuation of misinformation and recent "fake news" trends are just some of the latest popular approaches. We've been seeding our knowledge and information more recently with increasing degrees of falsehoods and pure fabrications. Now, enter "AI," especially generative flavors. The same people who wanted to undermine truth are foaming at the mouth at the current ability to produce vast amounts of noise that in some cases are almost indistinguishable from reality from current techniques we have. Not only that, fantasy lovers en masse are excited at the new level of fantasy they can be sold. They really really don't care or want the truth. They really do just want "a good looking picture", "to make the summary interesting", or just see some neat picture. They don't care how accurate it is. Now people interested in the truth are facing a deluge of technologically enabled difficult to seperate noise production. Is what I'm looking at close to reality? How many layers of noise are there I should consider when interpreting this piece of information? In the past, the layers used to be pretty managable, they were largely physical limitations or resource limitations to falsify the data to a point that couldn't be easily discerned. These days... it's becoming increasingly difficult to determine this and more and more information in various forms are leveraging more sophisticated and believable noise production. Technology has made this affordable to the masses and there are many parties with interest in setting the clock back to a world where the best story tellers are looked at as the oracles of modern time. People often scoff at ChatGPT that it seeds or "hallucinates" to interpolate and extrapolate gaps of knowledge and make connections but it does so in a way that people like. It projects confidence, certainty, and in many cases it gives exactly what people want. To me, it's scary because it's providing a service the majority seem to want and creating an onslaught of noise that's more costly to debunk than it is to produce.

azatom 4y ago

"Do you believe for your own eyes, or what I say!?" The future is BigCorp's AI will censure your photo when you try to take picture like on tiananmen square massacre. I want a photo, not even sharpend.

xwdv 4y ago

But it won’t end there. Eventually people won’t care much for clarity and precision, that’s boring. The real problem is that everything that can be photographed will eventually have been photographed in all kinds of ways. What people really want is just pictures that look more awesome, in ways other people haven’t seen before. So instead, raw photos will be little more than prompts that get fed to an AI that “reimagines” the image to be wildly different, using impossible or impractical perspectives, lighting, deleted crowds, anything you can imagine, even fantasy elements like massive planets in the sky or strange critters scurrying about. And thus, cameras will be more like having your own personal painter in your pocket, painting impressions of places you visit, making them far more interesting than you remember and delighting your followers with unique content. Worlds of pure imagination.

zirgs 4y ago
You can already do that with AI art generators right now. Can either generate images from scratch using prompts or enhancre existing images.
- xwdv 4y ago
  It’s in a cloud, not on your phone.
  - zirgs 4y ago
    They managed to run it on a phone: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2023/02/worlds-first-on-device-demonstration-of-stable-diffusion-on-android https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2023/02/worlds-first-on-de...
    - xwdv 4y ago
      Ok so we just have to wait for society to get to the point where they care about images more than photographs.

pessimizer 4y ago

We already have people demanding higher definition televisions to watch AI-sharpened 4K restorations of old films whose grain and focus would annihilate any details that small worth seeing. There's an arms race between people adding nonexistent details to old films and people manufacturing televisions with dense enough pixels to render those microscopic fictions. Then they lay a filter over it all and everything becomes smooth gradients with perfectly sharp edges.

Wistar 4y ago

The evidentiary value of photography will plummet.

rhaway84773 4y ago

If (when?) we start replacing mirrors with cameras and a screen, it’s possible we may go through life entirely without knowing what we look like.

Rexxar 4y ago
It's already somewhat the case with mirrors as we always see the symmetry of our real image.
wongarsu 4y ago
And everybody's body image improves as they only know the idealized version of themselves, but see the real version of their meatspace acquaintances. In the other hand, there will likely be a market for makeup mirrors that emphasize your flaws (both to help the user and to sell more product)

krona 4y ago

What you're imagining is Hyperreality from Simulacra and Simulation and has been happening since the invention of the television, and later the internet. AI will accelerate this process exponentially and just like in The Matrix, most people will eventually prefer the simulation to reality itself.

modeless 4y ago

People want this. It's already happening. There was a post on the Stable Diffusion reddit where someone ran a picture of their grandparents through it to colorize and make it "look nicer". But it made significant changes to their clothes and hallucinated some jewelry they weren't wearing, along with some subtle changes in the faces. It's not real anymore, but hey it looks nicer right?

astrange 4y ago
ControlNet already fixed that, you can constrain it to change colors and nothing else.

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago

I think the limitations are in optics and the signal processing stack, rather than the CMOS sensor. A better lens can go a long way.

cratermoon 4y ago

> hallucinated <soapbox>confabulated</soapbox>

marzell 4y ago

If we aren't already living in a simulation, then we've begun a feedback loop so that in the near future, we very well may be.

kurthr 4y ago

Oh man... I thought you were going to, "the stop signs and strip malls were how we discovered there were aliens on the Moon (and Mars) that look exactly like us!". Of course they would have perfect skin and expertly applied eye-liner and lipstick as well.

kugelblitz 4y ago

Reminds me of that CCC talk by David Kriesel https://youtu.be/zXXmhxbQ-hk https://youtu.be/zXXmhxbQ-hk "Don't trust any scan that you didn't falsify yourself" A "smart" scanner tries to compress images.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

The novelty of things like instagram is wearing off. I see more people not bothering to pull out their phone. It's not just wanting to compete with the photos taken by narcissist on the internet, it's also just losing interest, and knowing things you share can and will be used against you.

ochoseis 4y ago

Or, you know, Samsung sells ad placements in the enhanced images to do things like turn a can of Coke into a can of Pepsi, overwrite billboards in the background, etc.

user3939382 4y ago

I made a post about exactly this feedback loop wrt ChatGPT and it got no attention outside of one comment dismissing my point.

jlengrand 4y ago

Quite the equivalent (to me) to many kids preferring the taste of "strawberry yoghurt" compared to real strawberries, because it's sweeter and has enhanced taste. Except for photos. Not sure I like that future

kfrzcode 4y ago

"future?"

basch 4y ago

This will be the next step in film “restorations” too. A combination of ai models trained on high resolution textures and objects, models of the actors, and training from every frame of the movie that cal use the textures and geometry from multiple angles and cameras to “reconstruct” lost detail.

HyperSane 4y ago

This is actually making me want to start using film again because it is so much harder to fake.

HyperSane 4y ago

There is going to be a nasty feedback loop of AI being trained on its own output that will probably cause improvement to plateau.

c3534l 4y ago

I've seen this with CGI. CGI still looks awful somehow, but people about my age think it looks cinematic, and people a decade younger think it looks incredibly realistic.

gehwartzen 4y ago

I’ve always thought this was the final outcome of all AI; a feedback loop. Same when ChatGPT starts using things ChatGPT wrote itself as references to train itself.

jklinger410 4y ago

> This faked data, submitted by users as "real pics in real places" is further used to train AI models I am begging people to find a new gotcha for AI other than "training it on data created by itself or other AI." It's an obvious issue with obvious solutions. If it happens, it will be due to ignorance. It is not inevitable, and it shouldn't even be likely.