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Am I the only one bothered by: "As a professor of computational photography, I’ve seen how the latest smartphone features overcome the limitations of human vis
by rstuart4133 2y ago
Am I the only one bothered by:
"As a professor of computational photography, I’ve seen how the latest smartphone features overcome the limitations of human vision."
combined with:
"AI allow these devices to capture stunning images"
?
I'm not an expert, but every time I casually read about how computational photography works, I get the impression it is some very clever image processing algorithms (eg, pixel alignment of multiple images, anti shake, combining multiple images to enhance dynamic range, depth perception, detecting under and over exposure in parts of the image) put together by a software engineering team made up of entirely of humans. Occasionally there may be an AI detecting faces, smiles and blinks for things like timing and framing - but not in the aurora photos the article features.
Which means I'm looking at an instance of the term "AI" evolving in meaning in popular culture. Software engineers have a very particular set of statistical techniques and algorithm's when they use the term AI. The new meaning seems to be "any set of computational gymnastics it would require an expert to understand", or worse just: "big complex algorithm".
Sigh. It makes me sad. But then so did OS changing it's meaning from "a layer of software that abstracted the details of the underlying hardware from user space programs" to "Android" / "iOS" / "Windows". The old, more formal, precise and limited definition we software engineers invented is now at best jargon, but in reality probably gone. When I see younger programmers use the term "OS" here, they invariably mean the common definition.