12 ms·

Update to the “Samsung space zoom moon shots are fake”

234 points by ibreakphotos 4y ago

nkurz 4y ago
Simplified summary for those scared off by a link to Reddit: He made an image of an intentionally blurry moon, and then used the camera to take a picture of it while it was displayed on the monitor from across the room. The resulting picture was of a sharply detailed moon!
- chabes 4y ago
  This is an update to that post, with a new image with a moon and a half image of the moon together in one image. The full moon is enhanced, while the half image remains blurry.
  - kazinator 4y ago
    Which shows you it's not "AI"; it's more like some hacky code running right inside the phone which detects a plausible moon-like object in the image and fills it with pixels from a canned image. This is a lot like the ages-old trick of a compiler being rigged to recognize particular source file (benchmark program) and pulls out a hand-optimized assembly program.
    - to11mtm 4y ago
      > This is a lot like the ages-old trick of a compiler being rigged to recognize particular source file (benchmark program) and pulls out a hand-optimized assembly program. I never knew compilers did this, but I remember it being the case for some games (There was a debacle once upon a time where renaming 'Quake3.exe' to 'Quack3.exe' would reveal such shenanigans on some drivers.)
      - dotnet00 4y ago
        This is still the case with games, pretty much every new big release comes with an associated 'game ready driver' release where the driver can detect and adjust some behaviors to better suit that game.
        kazinator 4y ago
        But that provides a real benefit whereas the compiler trick's objective is to look good in a benchmark.
      - remram 4y ago
        A less-evil example is that most compilers can recognize when you wrote a memcpy() and replace it with an actual memcpy() call, which is usually very carefully optimized for your specific processor. This can cause fun issues like your version of memcpy() (e.g. embedded libc) being replaced by the compiler with a call to itself: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=56888 https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=56888
        tialaramex 4y ago
        The ability to figure out what you're doing and then just do that well, rather than attempting to optimise the code you wrote is called Idiom Recognition and has been around for a very long time, like, 1970s or maybe before. A relatively modern example was people writing code to count set bits in a value, because older languages don't provide an intrinsic to do that and it's often useful, these days your CPU probably has a CPU instruction specifically for that, it's called "popcount" (sometimes spelled popcnt) and so it's valuable to recognise what's going on in the say six lines of C++ in your program and emit a single POPCOUNT instruction instead. If your fancy method to count bits isn't recognised your program goes slower. The memcpy case is special because C is weird in actually trying to define this as a function, copying memory is so commonly necessary that compilers need to have a pre-baked implementation for the rest of what they do anyway, it's not a surprise that idiom recognition results in your custom memcpy being turned into the built-in memcpy, although in the case you linked that's indeed a bug.
    - kgwgk 4y ago
      > Which shows you it's not "AI"; it's more like some hacky code running right inside the phone which detects a plausible moon-like object in the image The hacky code runing right inside the phones detecting objects, identifying faces and whatnot is often called AI.
      - codeflo 4y ago
        Fucking single if statements are called AI these days. That's not a strong argument. :)
        Dudeman112 4y ago
        That's because AI is an awful expression :| Should have always been called "fancy algorithms" from the get-go, calling it "intelligence" opens the interpretation up for a world of misunderstandings
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        basch 4y ago
        Do neural networks fall into the algorithm category? How do you do squinting between an engineered process and a discovered relationship. Because the neural networks are much closer to discovered than engineered.
        Dudeman112 4y ago
        Yes. Being engineered or not is completely orthogonal to the discussion >Because the neural networks are much closer to discovered than engineered So is most code. Programmers in general can't engineer for shit, (half blindly) guided trial and error is the most common development paradigm
        ben30 4y ago
        My Samsung tumble dryer proudly tells me every time I turn it on, “optimised by AI”. But it’s not smart enough to know it’s told me that a hundred times before.
    - avian 4y ago
      Check a comment in the Reddit comment thread. The author of the post repeats the experiment with a blurred and modified picture of the moon that has craters in wrong places. The phone produced a photo of the moon that is less blurry, but also has craters in wrong places. This suggests it's not just using a canned image.
    - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
      > Which shows you it's not "AI"; it's more like some hacky code running right inside the phone which detects a plausible moon-like object in the image and fills it with pixels from a canned image. This is actually a common mode of breakage of standard vision models.
    - manojlds 4y ago
      Read the thread. Someone did with photoshopped crater and it enhanced that as well. It's like saying face recognition didn't recognized when you photoshopped a ear in the photo.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- lwhi 4y ago
  Why would people be scared of a Reddit link?
  - MengerSponge 4y ago
    Same reason I'm scared of TV Tropes [1] links. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbitHole https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbitHol...
  - xwdv 4y ago
    [flagged]
- agilob 4y ago
  Would it not be even easier to prove by simply switching camera app to a non-branded one?
  - ghshephard 4y ago
    You don't know where in the stack the optimization is taking place.
metadat 4y ago
The original discussion unfolded here 2 days ago: "Samsung “space zoom” moon shots are fake, and here is the proof" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601 (375 comments) And to potentially save you a click, here's the original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...
- praisewhitey 4y ago
  and here's post from 2021 doing the same tests with the Galaxy S21 Ultra https://old.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/l7ay2m/analysis_samsung_moon_shots_are_fake/ https://old.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/l7ay2m/analysis_sa...
drhagen 4y ago
I'm still skeptical. He blurred it and then cropped it. The sharp edge from the cropping is going to mess up the deconvolution optimization by causing any and all deconvolution to strongly reduce sharpness along that edge. If I'm right, the Samsung would restore both halves equally well if the blur was applied after the cropping rather than before. I still want to see this whole thing done without Gaussian blur, which is readily reversible by even primitive algorithms.
- redox99 4y ago
  > which is readily reversible by even primitive algorithms. Not true unless you know beforehand the exact kernel. Besides, there's 0 reason why a camera software be programmed to, or attempt to revert Gaussian blur. And finally, he downsampled the image, and you can't recover from that.
  - geoduck14 4y ago
    Isn't a gaussian blur a pretty standard blur done by a poorly focused camera? Perhaps Samsung went to great lengths to reverse a Gaussian blur because it happens all the time?
    - toxik 4y ago
      Gaussian blur is indeed super common in nature, any sum of noise will be Gaussian in the limit.
    - jrockway 4y ago
      Gaussian blur and the blur from out-of-focus lenses are a different kind of blur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defocus_aberration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defocus_aberration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur
    - Jasper_ 4y ago
      No, a real camera would give you a box blur, because the out-of-focus light rays are distributed uniformly across the sensor.
unxdfa 4y ago
Yeah I can just about get a decent crop of the moon on my Nikon Z50 with the 250mm lens on it that looks reasonable, if it’s on a tripod. There’s no way this wasn’t going to be some other trickery going on. What is worrying is why would you buy something with a camera that lies at source. When you need it to tell the truth, how do you know it will be telling it?
- dotnet00 4y ago
  The fact is that most people are not looking for a phone camera to tell the 'truth', they're simply looking for good images similar to what they're used to seeing from pros with their much more fancy equipment (and remember that most of those photographs are also heavily edited, just by a human instead of AI). The only objective truth that matters much to the average person is stuff like the text or qr code remaining correct.
  - unxdfa 4y ago
    I think it's more difficult than that. People are intimately aware when things are not what they seem. The brain is really good at being suspicious about stuff. If you take a photo and it comes out better than you can see yourself, then questions will be asked. This discontinuity does not sit well. As for the professionals, a lot of stuff is edited yes. But there is an art to not needing to do any editing worth mentioning. I think there's some intellectual honesty in not painting over any cracks.
  - Mordisquitos 4y ago
    Most people do not care about their phone camera telling "the truth" because they are operating under the base assumption that cameras do tell the truth, and that their phone camera is honestly Very Good™ at capturing the true image that they're seeing with such a level of detail. That customers are not aware of the level to which professional images are processed is no justification for these features being sneaked in. If these features were openly presented as some kind of augmented reality or editing it wouldn't be an issue, but as it stands it is no different from, for example, presenting an entertainment television network as if it were actual fact-based news, and justifying it by arguing that viewers are not looking for the truth but for something that makes them feel that they know the truth.
bee_rider 4y ago
It will be quite weird to have this brief blip in the anthropological record of like 1980-2010 where cameras were cheap enough that lots of real images were captured, and then 2010-2019 where everyone (in rich western countries at least) had cameras all the time and we got tons of real images of everyday life (filters are popular of course but using them is an intentional choice). Then everyone goes inside for like 2 years (pandemic), there isn’t much to take pictures of, and then by the time we start going back outside everything is actually paintings by AI artists.
- zaroth 4y ago
  When the AI generated content outnumbers human content 10,000 to 1, and the quality is almost ridiculously varied and sometimes incredible, and no functional system can sustainably authenticate humans without being overrun by bots… Then the record from that point forward and forever hence will be one of AI, not one of humanity.
  - btown 4y ago
    Arguably this is already true of text. We have already entered the age where it is impossible to determine with certainty whether a blog article was written by a human, and so every text data set that includes 2023 internet data will include ChatGPT outputs as ground truth. Future historians will likely place a great deal of emphasis on 2019 being the year in which we reached a forever-maximum of non-pandemic-tinged provably-human-created data. It's no reason to panic, and the mixed data sets will absolutely be representative of humanity's accomplishments as a whole... but there will be notable differences.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      > We have already entered the age where it is impossible to determine with certainty whether a blog article was written by a human, and so every text data set that includes 2023 internet data will include ChatGPT outputs as ground truth. Is that any worse than unreliable humans? Whether they're intentionally lying or just mistaken, internet posts should always be taken with a grain of salt, for decades now.
323 4y ago
Next gen: you go to a music concert and take some crappy photos - low light, far from scene. AI recognizes the artist and downloads artist's most recent high-res stock pictures from GettyImages, has a general model of how a scene is setup, lights, lasers, and re-synthesizes your photo into something with the production quality of a movie concert scene. In a movie it also resamples the clipped audio with the actual song ran though a "live concert" audio filter, adds some nice crowd noises too. Next-next-gen: using deep fake technology artist voices a song dedication just for you.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  If crappy phone photos are enough to make a decent depth map, I think Stablediffusion can do this today. The only missing piece would be for the band to train a model on high quality photos from specifically their concerts. ControlNet is really neat
- ssnistfajen 4y ago
  From a technological perspective those are neat. But AI (or any computer program) hallucinating entire experiences that never existed is kind of disturbing even if said experience is actually nice.
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  Next-next-next-gen: BigTech corps offers a machine-brain interface so that you can "enhance" your own senses with the help of external processing power. Your reality is about to change, but not without a ton of ads which you cannot escape.
  - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
    You get a neural interface that lets you learn and process information 100x faster but there's always an ad in the corner of your vision. Do you accept?
  - Gunnerhead 4y ago
    Yet psychedelics and weed to also enhance your experience will continue to be federally illegal.
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
There are aftermarket photography apps. Has anybody tried taking their Samsung S23 and photographing the moon /w one of those? I wonder if the "AI assistant" is limited to Samsung's own bundled camera app, or if it's always on & modifies pictures taken via other apps.
- gruez 4y ago
  You can just turn off "scene optimizer" in the stock app.
mrtksn 4y ago
It happens that Samsung is actually doing brilliant job in faking it, even accounting for obstruction like tree branches etc: https://twitter.com/David4252579/status/1634919880217731075 https://twitter.com/David4252579/status/1634919880217731075 All this could have been OK if Samsung wasn't misleading people into believing that the picture is a result of computational photography and excellent optics. I would love to have this in my phone's camera, but clearly identified as details added after the fact and might not represent the actual scene. It's done so well that practically no one noticed and people like MKBHD reeved it as a photography achievement. The truth is, the non-AI implementations also fail to capture how we see the Moon and fixing it with fake details is a welcome improvement as long as it's clear that that's not actual capture.
- sorenjan 4y ago
  According to a comment on Reddit this only happens when "Scene Optimizer" is active in the camera. I don't know if this is the default, it probably is nowadays, but my phone camera's equivalent is labeled AI. I think the public needs to be educated that modern AI basically means to make up new data based on a statistical model from training data, i.e. fake.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    In that comment which refers to an article, scene optimiser is described as AI optimising photography parameters like exposure, doesn't mention making up details. If this is Samsung's position, then it's totally not cool.
xattt 4y ago
I’m just frustrated that there isn’t even basic thought from Samsung’s end. It could at the very least pull location data, check to see if the moon is above the horizon for the location, check to see if the phase of the moon matches what it sees and THEN apply the filter.
- msm_ 4y ago
  Do we know what it's doing exactly? It can be just doing some AI enhancement during post-processing. In this case the moon is not literally hardcoded, but a part of some opaque machine learning model.
lagadu 4y ago
Reading further into that thread, someone provides the OP with a blurry image of the moon but with craters in the wrong places: the "AI enhanced" photo is indeed much sharper and detailed than the original but it still retains the craters and land features in the wrong place. This suggests that the processing isn't simply replacing the moon with real, high-quality moon photos but rather that it knows how the moon, or a moon-like object, should look and creates detail on the original image. This looks a lot like what DLSS does in GPUs. I'm torn on this: it's fake but it's a good way of getting around optics limitations in certain scenarios. Is fake detail on a photo worse than no detail for non-scientific, consumer devices?
- dmix 4y ago
  Samsung's own spokesperon said this is an explicit feature of the phone. > But I also want to include one caveat: the S21 Ultra’s Scene Optimizer will not suddenly make all 100x zoom photos look as crispy as the Moon. Samsung flat-out says the Scene Optimizer can recognize “more than 30 scenes.” That includes the following according to a spokesperson: > Food, Portraits, Flowers, Indoor scenes, Animals, Landscapes, Greenery, Trees, Sky, Mountains, Beaches, Sunrises and sunsets, Watersides, Street scenes, Night scenes, Waterfalls, Snow, Birds, Backlit, Text, Clothing, Vehicle, Shoe, Dog, Face, Drink, Stage, Baby, People, Cat, Moon. If it was just the normal camera 'faking' photos it'd be bad, but they literally offer a list of stuff that their zoom tab will AI-optimize. You can still use the regular camera to turn this feature off. To me this sounds like a cool but simply misunderstood feature.
  - RobotToaster 4y ago
    >Animals will be interesting to see how that works with less common animals. I can see it getting confused with, for example, a capybara, thinking it's a dog, and filling in the details making a picture of a weird hybrid dogybara.
    - xattt 4y ago
      I offer you a capydoga.
achairapart 4y ago
I'm amazed at this New York Times article from 1984 narrating about a "not-too-distant future" that is actually happening now: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/04/magazine/photography-s-new-bag-of-tricks.html https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/04/magazine/photography-s-ne... > In the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart. We may have to rely on the image maker, and not the image, to tell us into which category certain pictures fall.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- themoonisachees 4y ago
  Even before AI that was true. France has a law that mandates every photoshopped picture of people used in advertising to be labeled as doctored. They just put it in tiny text on the side, but every single French ad with a person on it does say "Photo Retouchée" (because of course they all are)
  - m463 4y ago
    I wonder if that applies to (automatic) in-camera filters/effects nowadays.
furyofantares 4y ago
I'm not really "nail in the coffin" convinced. Is there a process that does something akin to identifying the moon, and selecting a special filter for that? I'm pretty convinced of this. (Both by the evidence and also it's apparently advertised as such?) What is that filter? I don't know, and the answer to this would inform "how fake" I think these images are. It does seem to be a moon-specific treatment. It doesn't seem to be pasting a JPG of the moon and it doesn't seem to be generating the moon. How fake it is, is, I think a measure of how dependent the result is on the specific sensor data, and how localized the changes are. If there's a moon-specific filter that's excellent at filling in data "between" sensed pixels without looking at any pixels far away (beyond, perhaps, the initial categorization as a photo of the moon where this filter would be good), that's not very fake to me. If there was suddenly a new structure on the moon visible to the sensors, I'd want it reflected in the photo. I would consider the process very fake if it couldn't do that at all, and not very fake if it could do it reliably.
yread 4y ago
If you didn't go through the comments, this one is interesting imo: someone took a handheld picture of the moon with S21 using GCAM instead of the default app and the results are also quite awesome: https://imgur.com/a/jf1Cbqu https://imgur.com/a/jf1Cbqu
brokenmachine 4y ago
I wonder what kind of implications this will have for court cases. There will have to be expert witnesses to discuss any image that is brought in, if it's real or not.
SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
Scott Hanselman posted today that this is no secret. Samsung have been talking openly about their "Moon Recognition Engine". It's on their website: In Korean, of course. But there's an automated translation of that too. https://www.tiktok.com/@shanselman/video/7209770920301399342?_r=1&_t=8aarTAPfxUp https://www.tiktok.com/@shanselman/video/7209770920301399342... https://hachyderm.io/@shanselman/110012495335125530 https://hachyderm.io/@shanselman/110012495335125530
Jiro 4y ago
I am not convinced this means they are fake. I'd expect any image enhancement using good AI to depend on the surrounding areas. This could plausibly cause a blank square to be filled in when the surrounding areas have data, while a blank square on its own is not.
paxys 4y ago
I don't know why this saga is still ongoing. It is a known fact that Samsung enhances the quality of known objects in images with AI. They literally advertise this.
tpreetham 4y ago
When does computational photography count as "fake" or "AI generated"? I don't see the line.

234 points by ibreakphotos 4y ago

Simplified summary for those scared off by a link to Reddit: He made an image of an intentionally blurry moon, and then used the camera to take a picture of it while it was displayed on the monitor from across the room. The resulting picture was of a sharply detailed moon!

chabes 4y ago
This is an update to that post, with a new image with a moon and a half image of the moon together in one image. The full moon is enhanced, while the half image remains blurry.
- kazinator 4y ago
  Which shows you it's not "AI"; it's more like some hacky code running right inside the phone which detects a plausible moon-like object in the image and fills it with pixels from a canned image. This is a lot like the ages-old trick of a compiler being rigged to recognize particular source file (benchmark program) and pulls out a hand-optimized assembly program.
  - to11mtm 4y ago
    > This is a lot like the ages-old trick of a compiler being rigged to recognize particular source file (benchmark program) and pulls out a hand-optimized assembly program. I never knew compilers did this, but I remember it being the case for some games (There was a debacle once upon a time where renaming 'Quake3.exe' to 'Quack3.exe' would reveal such shenanigans on some drivers.)
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      This is still the case with games, pretty much every new big release comes with an associated 'game ready driver' release where the driver can detect and adjust some behaviors to better suit that game.
      - kazinator 4y ago
        But that provides a real benefit whereas the compiler trick's objective is to look good in a benchmark.
    - remram 4y ago
      A less-evil example is that most compilers can recognize when you wrote a memcpy() and replace it with an actual memcpy() call, which is usually very carefully optimized for your specific processor. This can cause fun issues like your version of memcpy() (e.g. embedded libc) being replaced by the compiler with a call to itself: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=56888 https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=56888
      - tialaramex 4y ago
        The ability to figure out what you're doing and then just do that well, rather than attempting to optimise the code you wrote is called Idiom Recognition and has been around for a very long time, like, 1970s or maybe before. A relatively modern example was people writing code to count set bits in a value, because older languages don't provide an intrinsic to do that and it's often useful, these days your CPU probably has a CPU instruction specifically for that, it's called "popcount" (sometimes spelled popcnt) and so it's valuable to recognise what's going on in the say six lines of C++ in your program and emit a single POPCOUNT instruction instead. If your fancy method to count bits isn't recognised your program goes slower. The memcpy case is special because C is weird in actually trying to define this as a function, copying memory is so commonly necessary that compilers need to have a pre-baked implementation for the rest of what they do anyway, it's not a surprise that idiom recognition results in your custom memcpy being turned into the built-in memcpy, although in the case you linked that's indeed a bug.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    > Which shows you it's not "AI"; it's more like some hacky code running right inside the phone which detects a plausible moon-like object in the image The hacky code runing right inside the phones detecting objects, identifying faces and whatnot is often called AI.
    - codeflo 4y ago
      Fucking single if statements are called AI these days. That's not a strong argument. :)
      - Dudeman112 4y ago
        That's because AI is an awful expression :| Should have always been called "fancy algorithms" from the get-go, calling it "intelligence" opens the interpretation up for a world of misunderstandings
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        basch 4y ago
        Do neural networks fall into the algorithm category? How do you do squinting between an engineered process and a discovered relationship. Because the neural networks are much closer to discovered than engineered.
        Dudeman112 4y ago
        Yes. Being engineered or not is completely orthogonal to the discussion >Because the neural networks are much closer to discovered than engineered So is most code. Programmers in general can't engineer for shit, (half blindly) guided trial and error is the most common development paradigm
      - ben30 4y ago
        My Samsung tumble dryer proudly tells me every time I turn it on, “optimised by AI”. But it’s not smart enough to know it’s told me that a hundred times before.
  - avian 4y ago
    Check a comment in the Reddit comment thread. The author of the post repeats the experiment with a blurred and modified picture of the moon that has craters in wrong places. The phone produced a photo of the moon that is less blurry, but also has craters in wrong places. This suggests it's not just using a canned image.
  - cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    > Which shows you it's not "AI"; it's more like some hacky code running right inside the phone which detects a plausible moon-like object in the image and fills it with pixels from a canned image. This is actually a common mode of breakage of standard vision models.
  - manojlds 4y ago
    Read the thread. Someone did with photoshopped crater and it enhanced that as well. It's like saying face recognition didn't recognized when you photoshopped a ear in the photo.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
lwhi 4y ago
Why would people be scared of a Reddit link?
- MengerSponge 4y ago
  Same reason I'm scared of TV Tropes [1] links. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbitHole https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbitHol...
- xwdv 4y ago
  [flagged]
agilob 4y ago
Would it not be even easier to prove by simply switching camera app to a non-branded one?
- ghshephard 4y ago
  You don't know where in the stack the optimization is taking place.

metadat 4y ago

The original discussion unfolded here 2 days ago: "Samsung “space zoom” moon shots are fake, and here is the proof" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601 (375 comments) And to potentially save you a click, here's the original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...

praisewhitey 4y ago
and here's post from 2021 doing the same tests with the Galaxy S21 Ultra https://old.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/l7ay2m/analysis_samsung_moon_shots_are_fake/ https://old.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/l7ay2m/analysis_sa...

drhagen 4y ago

I'm still skeptical. He blurred it and then cropped it. The sharp edge from the cropping is going to mess up the deconvolution optimization by causing any and all deconvolution to strongly reduce sharpness along that edge. If I'm right, the Samsung would restore both halves equally well if the blur was applied after the cropping rather than before. I still want to see this whole thing done without Gaussian blur, which is readily reversible by even primitive algorithms.

redox99 4y ago
> which is readily reversible by even primitive algorithms. Not true unless you know beforehand the exact kernel. Besides, there's 0 reason why a camera software be programmed to, or attempt to revert Gaussian blur. And finally, he downsampled the image, and you can't recover from that.
- geoduck14 4y ago
  Isn't a gaussian blur a pretty standard blur done by a poorly focused camera? Perhaps Samsung went to great lengths to reverse a Gaussian blur because it happens all the time?
  - toxik 4y ago
    Gaussian blur is indeed super common in nature, any sum of noise will be Gaussian in the limit.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Gaussian blur and the blur from out-of-focus lenses are a different kind of blur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defocus_aberration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defocus_aberration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur
  - Jasper_ 4y ago
    No, a real camera would give you a box blur, because the out-of-focus light rays are distributed uniformly across the sensor.

unxdfa 4y ago

Yeah I can just about get a decent crop of the moon on my Nikon Z50 with the 250mm lens on it that looks reasonable, if it’s on a tripod. There’s no way this wasn’t going to be some other trickery going on. What is worrying is why would you buy something with a camera that lies at source. When you need it to tell the truth, how do you know it will be telling it?

dotnet00 4y ago
The fact is that most people are not looking for a phone camera to tell the 'truth', they're simply looking for good images similar to what they're used to seeing from pros with their much more fancy equipment (and remember that most of those photographs are also heavily edited, just by a human instead of AI). The only objective truth that matters much to the average person is stuff like the text or qr code remaining correct.
- unxdfa 4y ago
  I think it's more difficult than that. People are intimately aware when things are not what they seem. The brain is really good at being suspicious about stuff. If you take a photo and it comes out better than you can see yourself, then questions will be asked. This discontinuity does not sit well. As for the professionals, a lot of stuff is edited yes. But there is an art to not needing to do any editing worth mentioning. I think there's some intellectual honesty in not painting over any cracks.
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  Most people do not care about their phone camera telling "the truth" because they are operating under the base assumption that cameras do tell the truth, and that their phone camera is honestly Very Good™ at capturing the true image that they're seeing with such a level of detail. That customers are not aware of the level to which professional images are processed is no justification for these features being sneaked in. If these features were openly presented as some kind of augmented reality or editing it wouldn't be an issue, but as it stands it is no different from, for example, presenting an entertainment television network as if it were actual fact-based news, and justifying it by arguing that viewers are not looking for the truth but for something that makes them feel that they know the truth.

bee_rider 4y ago

It will be quite weird to have this brief blip in the anthropological record of like 1980-2010 where cameras were cheap enough that lots of real images were captured, and then 2010-2019 where everyone (in rich western countries at least) had cameras all the time and we got tons of real images of everyday life (filters are popular of course but using them is an intentional choice). Then everyone goes inside for like 2 years (pandemic), there isn’t much to take pictures of, and then by the time we start going back outside everything is actually paintings by AI artists.

zaroth 4y ago
When the AI generated content outnumbers human content 10,000 to 1, and the quality is almost ridiculously varied and sometimes incredible, and no functional system can sustainably authenticate humans without being overrun by bots… Then the record from that point forward and forever hence will be one of AI, not one of humanity.
- btown 4y ago
  Arguably this is already true of text. We have already entered the age where it is impossible to determine with certainty whether a blog article was written by a human, and so every text data set that includes 2023 internet data will include ChatGPT outputs as ground truth. Future historians will likely place a great deal of emphasis on 2019 being the year in which we reached a forever-maximum of non-pandemic-tinged provably-human-created data. It's no reason to panic, and the mixed data sets will absolutely be representative of humanity's accomplishments as a whole... but there will be notable differences.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > We have already entered the age where it is impossible to determine with certainty whether a blog article was written by a human, and so every text data set that includes 2023 internet data will include ChatGPT outputs as ground truth. Is that any worse than unreliable humans? Whether they're intentionally lying or just mistaken, internet posts should always be taken with a grain of salt, for decades now.

323 4y ago

Next gen: you go to a music concert and take some crappy photos - low light, far from scene. AI recognizes the artist and downloads artist's most recent high-res stock pictures from GettyImages, has a general model of how a scene is setup, lights, lasers, and re-synthesizes your photo into something with the production quality of a movie concert scene. In a movie it also resamples the clipped audio with the actual song ran though a "live concert" audio filter, adds some nice crowd noises too. Next-next-gen: using deep fake technology artist voices a song dedication just for you.

cwkoss 4y ago
If crappy phone photos are enough to make a decent depth map, I think Stablediffusion can do this today. The only missing piece would be for the band to train a model on high quality photos from specifically their concerts. ControlNet is really neat
ssnistfajen 4y ago
From a technological perspective those are neat. But AI (or any computer program) hallucinating entire experiences that never existed is kind of disturbing even if said experience is actually nice.
TrackerFF 4y ago
Next-next-next-gen: BigTech corps offers a machine-brain interface so that you can "enhance" your own senses with the help of external processing power. Your reality is about to change, but not without a ton of ads which you cannot escape.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  You get a neural interface that lets you learn and process information 100x faster but there's always an ad in the corner of your vision. Do you accept?
- Gunnerhead 4y ago
  Yet psychedelics and weed to also enhance your experience will continue to be federally illegal.

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A_D_E_P_T 4y ago

There are aftermarket photography apps. Has anybody tried taking their Samsung S23 and photographing the moon /w one of those? I wonder if the "AI assistant" is limited to Samsung's own bundled camera app, or if it's always on & modifies pictures taken via other apps.

gruez 4y ago
You can just turn off "scene optimizer" in the stock app.

mrtksn 4y ago

It happens that Samsung is actually doing brilliant job in faking it, even accounting for obstruction like tree branches etc: https://twitter.com/David4252579/status/1634919880217731075 https://twitter.com/David4252579/status/1634919880217731075 All this could have been OK if Samsung wasn't misleading people into believing that the picture is a result of computational photography and excellent optics. I would love to have this in my phone's camera, but clearly identified as details added after the fact and might not represent the actual scene. It's done so well that practically no one noticed and people like MKBHD reeved it as a photography achievement. The truth is, the non-AI implementations also fail to capture how we see the Moon and fixing it with fake details is a welcome improvement as long as it's clear that that's not actual capture.

sorenjan 4y ago
According to a comment on Reddit this only happens when "Scene Optimizer" is active in the camera. I don't know if this is the default, it probably is nowadays, but my phone camera's equivalent is labeled AI. I think the public needs to be educated that modern AI basically means to make up new data based on a statistical model from training data, i.e. fake.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  In that comment which refers to an article, scene optimiser is described as AI optimising photography parameters like exposure, doesn't mention making up details. If this is Samsung's position, then it's totally not cool.

xattt 4y ago

I’m just frustrated that there isn’t even basic thought from Samsung’s end. It could at the very least pull location data, check to see if the moon is above the horizon for the location, check to see if the phase of the moon matches what it sees and THEN apply the filter.

msm_ 4y ago
Do we know what it's doing exactly? It can be just doing some AI enhancement during post-processing. In this case the moon is not literally hardcoded, but a part of some opaque machine learning model.

lagadu 4y ago

Reading further into that thread, someone provides the OP with a blurry image of the moon but with craters in the wrong places: the "AI enhanced" photo is indeed much sharper and detailed than the original but it still retains the craters and land features in the wrong place. This suggests that the processing isn't simply replacing the moon with real, high-quality moon photos but rather that it knows how the moon, or a moon-like object, should look and creates detail on the original image. This looks a lot like what DLSS does in GPUs. I'm torn on this: it's fake but it's a good way of getting around optics limitations in certain scenarios. Is fake detail on a photo worse than no detail for non-scientific, consumer devices?

dmix 4y ago
Samsung's own spokesperon said this is an explicit feature of the phone. > But I also want to include one caveat: the S21 Ultra’s Scene Optimizer will not suddenly make all 100x zoom photos look as crispy as the Moon. Samsung flat-out says the Scene Optimizer can recognize “more than 30 scenes.” That includes the following according to a spokesperson: > Food, Portraits, Flowers, Indoor scenes, Animals, Landscapes, Greenery, Trees, Sky, Mountains, Beaches, Sunrises and sunsets, Watersides, Street scenes, Night scenes, Waterfalls, Snow, Birds, Backlit, Text, Clothing, Vehicle, Shoe, Dog, Face, Drink, Stage, Baby, People, Cat, Moon. If it was just the normal camera 'faking' photos it'd be bad, but they literally offer a list of stuff that their zoom tab will AI-optimize. You can still use the regular camera to turn this feature off. To me this sounds like a cool but simply misunderstood feature.
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  >Animals will be interesting to see how that works with less common animals. I can see it getting confused with, for example, a capybara, thinking it's a dog, and filling in the details making a picture of a weird hybrid dogybara.
  - xattt 4y ago
    I offer you a capydoga.

achairapart 4y ago

I'm amazed at this New York Times article from 1984 narrating about a "not-too-distant future" that is actually happening now: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/04/magazine/photography-s-new-bag-of-tricks.html https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/04/magazine/photography-s-ne... > In the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart. We may have to rely on the image maker, and not the image, to tell us into which category certain pictures fall.

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themoonisachees 4y ago
Even before AI that was true. France has a law that mandates every photoshopped picture of people used in advertising to be labeled as doctored. They just put it in tiny text on the side, but every single French ad with a person on it does say "Photo Retouchée" (because of course they all are)
- m463 4y ago
  I wonder if that applies to (automatic) in-camera filters/effects nowadays.

furyofantares 4y ago

I'm not really "nail in the coffin" convinced. Is there a process that does something akin to identifying the moon, and selecting a special filter for that? I'm pretty convinced of this. (Both by the evidence and also it's apparently advertised as such?) What is that filter? I don't know, and the answer to this would inform "how fake" I think these images are. It does seem to be a moon-specific treatment. It doesn't seem to be pasting a JPG of the moon and it doesn't seem to be generating the moon. How fake it is, is, I think a measure of how dependent the result is on the specific sensor data, and how localized the changes are. If there's a moon-specific filter that's excellent at filling in data "between" sensed pixels without looking at any pixels far away (beyond, perhaps, the initial categorization as a photo of the moon where this filter would be good), that's not very fake to me. If there was suddenly a new structure on the moon visible to the sensors, I'd want it reflected in the photo. I would consider the process very fake if it couldn't do that at all, and not very fake if it could do it reliably.

yread 4y ago

If you didn't go through the comments, this one is interesting imo: someone took a handheld picture of the moon with S21 using GCAM instead of the default app and the results are also quite awesome: https://imgur.com/a/jf1Cbqu https://imgur.com/a/jf1Cbqu

brokenmachine 4y ago

I wonder what kind of implications this will have for court cases. There will have to be expert witnesses to discuss any image that is brought in, if it's real or not.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago

Scott Hanselman posted today that this is no secret. Samsung have been talking openly about their "Moon Recognition Engine". It's on their website: In Korean, of course. But there's an automated translation of that too. https://www.tiktok.com/@shanselman/video/7209770920301399342?_r=1&_t=8aarTAPfxUp https://www.tiktok.com/@shanselman/video/7209770920301399342... https://hachyderm.io/@shanselman/110012495335125530 https://hachyderm.io/@shanselman/110012495335125530

Jiro 4y ago

I am not convinced this means they are fake. I'd expect any image enhancement using good AI to depend on the surrounding areas. This could plausibly cause a blank square to be filled in when the surrounding areas have data, while a blank square on its own is not.

paxys 4y ago

I don't know why this saga is still ongoing. It is a known fact that Samsung enhances the quality of known objects in images with AI. They literally advertise this.

tpreetham 4y ago

When does computational photography count as "fake" or "AI generated"? I don't see the line.