28 ms·

This is a more serious problem than that, because AI does in fact make stuff up, and will bullshit logical connections that make superficial sense but don't mat

by jprete 3y ago

This is a more serious problem than that, because AI does in fact make stuff up, and will bullshit logical connections that make superficial sense but don't match the system under discussion. I think a better analogy is airbrushing photos to remove people; it changes the facts of the photo in a way people care about. Likewise, it's a problem if people sloppily use GenAI to fix up text or graphs or whatever, and it creates things that match the paper really well but don't match reality. Those are _exactly_ the kinds of problems that will slip through peer review very easily. Fixing white balance, or a thousand other old-school photo changes, is very different; the underlying structure of the photo is there and nobody cares about white balance or most of those old corrections, because our eyes and brains are constantly mucking with them anyway. People care about airbrushing or GenAI-"airbrushing" parts of the picture, because the information content we care about is changed.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> I think a better analogy is airbrushing photos to remove people; it changes the facts of the photo in a way people care about. I was thinking about this a lot recently with the announcement of the Pixel 8. One of the big announced features was "Magic Editor", where you could edit all your photos to automatically put smiles on people who were frowning, remove people altogether like that inconvenient homeless person or garbage truck: https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-8-pro/ https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-8-pro/ This may be a bit "get off my lawn", but honestly I was disgusted. Why do people feel their everyday family photos need to match some Insta-bullshit ideal? Some of my favorite old family pics are where something "wrong" or unexpected happens. I don't fault Google for this, and I think it's natural to want to touch up photos when you're taking an important picture. But I feel like we're careening towards a future where we're starting to forget what reality actually is. When TikTok came out with their extremely realistic "makeup filters", I remember seeing a video where a photographer commented that she would take pictures of women who were shocked at how "ugly" they were because they weren't used to seeing "un-Facetuned" photos of themselves. Sorry for the semi-rant, just feels like a situation where any individual, small technological improvement makes sense, but in totality we end up at a place that is overall worse than where we started.
- circuit10 3y ago
  I think that once you start editing a picture in a way that isn’t equivalent to just having different camera settings you aren’t capturing a moment anymore, at best you’re creating a new artwork which is fine but I don’t think it’s good to pretend to yourself or others that it’s actually what happened
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Agreed, but that is clearly not how Google is positioning "Magic Editor": "Magic Editor in Google Photos is a new experimental editing experience that uses generative AI to help you bring your photos in line with the essence of the moment you were trying to capture." Then here is the example video they show of a sample photo edit: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/original_videos/Best_Take.mp4 https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori... After all, why take a picture of your family when your kid is making a silly face when you can instead "fix" him so that you now look like the Stepford-family, JC Penney ad that God intended.
    - circuit10 3y ago
      To be clear I agree and my comment was adding to yours rather than arguing against it

by jprete 3y ago

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

> I think a better analogy is airbrushing photos to remove people; it changes the facts of the photo in a way people care about. I was thinking about this a lot recently with the announcement of the Pixel 8. One of the big announced features was "Magic Editor", where you could edit all your photos to automatically put smiles on people who were frowning, remove people altogether like that inconvenient homeless person or garbage truck: https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-8-pro/ https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-8-pro/ This may be a bit "get off my lawn", but honestly I was disgusted. Why do people feel their everyday family photos need to match some Insta-bullshit ideal? Some of my favorite old family pics are where something "wrong" or unexpected happens. I don't fault Google for this, and I think it's natural to want to touch up photos when you're taking an important picture. But I feel like we're careening towards a future where we're starting to forget what reality actually is. When TikTok came out with their extremely realistic "makeup filters", I remember seeing a video where a photographer commented that she would take pictures of women who were shocked at how "ugly" they were because they weren't used to seeing "un-Facetuned" photos of themselves. Sorry for the semi-rant, just feels like a situation where any individual, small technological improvement makes sense, but in totality we end up at a place that is overall worse than where we started.

circuit10 3y ago
I think that once you start editing a picture in a way that isn’t equivalent to just having different camera settings you aren’t capturing a moment anymore, at best you’re creating a new artwork which is fine but I don’t think it’s good to pretend to yourself or others that it’s actually what happened
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Agreed, but that is clearly not how Google is positioning "Magic Editor": "Magic Editor in Google Photos is a new experimental editing experience that uses generative AI to help you bring your photos in line with the essence of the moment you were trying to capture." Then here is the example video they show of a sample photo edit: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/original_videos/Best_Take.mp4 https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori... After all, why take a picture of your family when your kid is making a silly face when you can instead "fix" him so that you now look like the Stepford-family, JC Penney ad that God intended.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    To be clear I agree and my comment was adding to yours rather than arguing against it