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I appreciate the artistic license of saying the "AIs" are doing this, but this isn't an AI issue at all. This is a particular single purpose program "Smile!" wh

by whitten 12y ago

I appreciate the artistic license of saying the "AIs" are doing this, but this isn't an AI issue at all. This is a particular single purpose program "Smile!" which is producing results by combining pictures together to produce a picture the author never took with a camera. He could have blamed Snidely Whiplash, or the greek god Zeus with just as much verity.

yk 12y ago
To generate this effect a program has to identify, that the photos are almost identical, that there are smiling people in them and then find a way to stitch the two photos together. I think that qualifies as AI.
- shakethemonkey 12y ago
  It's AI in the sense that a pocket calculator from 1980 is AI. It doesn't know what it's doing, can only perform a limited range of calculations under tight constraints, has no awareness of whether or not the result is meaningful, and unless the authors went seriously overboard developing the suite, cannot learn from what it has done to improve the process.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    It's pretty likely that the techniques being used fall under the term AI as used by people in the field. Actually, I'd be quite surprised if that wasn't the case.
  - yk 12y ago
    Well, I am afraid that we are discussing semantics. The functions performed by the software, like facial recognition, are classical AI problems. Granted the software is certainly not any kind of general intelligence, and probably not even cutting edge AI, but it does still perform pattern recognition in unstructured data etc.
    - yen223 12y ago
      Ironically, parsing semantics is also a classic AI problem.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Twenty years ago what your phone is doing now was called AI. Now you call it "search engine" and "voice recognition". In the mind of people from outside the field, "AI" means "things computers can't do". The moment they are able to do something, it stops being called "AI" and becomes mundane.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- chc 12y ago
  It does, but in the article, the author is clearly using a grander sense of "AI" where computers are making autonomous decisions without our knowledge rather than just a clever heuristic. This is not that AI.
pnathan 12y ago
That's a very stupid AI, directed by a human to robotically go after certain categories of pictures and meld them.
Houshalter 12y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_AI >Weak AI (also known as narrow AI) defines non-sentient computer intelligence, typically focused on a narrow task. The intelligence of weak AI is limited. Typically people refer to algorithms that use machine learning, optimization, or other things once believed to be part of the field of AI (once we understand how to do them, they are no longer "AI".) People have been using the word "AI" like this for decades, to the point it's used far more to refer to weak AI than strong AI. When you talk about strong AI you generally have to specify it. I would say that AI is very closely related to this though. Deep learning is taking over machine vision and simpler hand coded algorithms. It has the capability to generate good synthetic images, and it will probably be used for stuff like this a lot in the future, if it isn't already.

by whitten 12y ago

yk 12y ago

To generate this effect a program has to identify, that the photos are almost identical, that there are smiling people in them and then find a way to stitch the two photos together. I think that qualifies as AI.

shakethemonkey 12y ago
It's AI in the sense that a pocket calculator from 1980 is AI. It doesn't know what it's doing, can only perform a limited range of calculations under tight constraints, has no awareness of whether or not the result is meaningful, and unless the authors went seriously overboard developing the suite, cannot learn from what it has done to improve the process.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  It's pretty likely that the techniques being used fall under the term AI as used by people in the field. Actually, I'd be quite surprised if that wasn't the case.
- yk 12y ago
  Well, I am afraid that we are discussing semantics. The functions performed by the software, like facial recognition, are classical AI problems. Granted the software is certainly not any kind of general intelligence, and probably not even cutting edge AI, but it does still perform pattern recognition in unstructured data etc.
  - yen223 12y ago
    Ironically, parsing semantics is also a classic AI problem.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Twenty years ago what your phone is doing now was called AI. Now you call it "search engine" and "voice recognition". In the mind of people from outside the field, "AI" means "things computers can't do". The moment they are able to do something, it stops being called "AI" and becomes mundane.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
chc 12y ago
It does, but in the article, the author is clearly using a grander sense of "AI" where computers are making autonomous decisions without our knowledge rather than just a clever heuristic. This is not that AI.

pnathan 12y ago

That's a very stupid AI, directed by a human to robotically go after certain categories of pictures and meld them.

Houshalter 12y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_AI >Weak AI (also known as narrow AI) defines non-sentient computer intelligence, typically focused on a narrow task. The intelligence of weak AI is limited. Typically people refer to algorithms that use machine learning, optimization, or other things once believed to be part of the field of AI (once we understand how to do them, they are no longer "AI".) People have been using the word "AI" like this for decades, to the point it's used far more to refer to weak AI than strong AI. When you talk about strong AI you generally have to specify it. I would say that AI is very closely related to this though. Deep learning is taking over machine vision and simpler hand coded algorithms. It has the capability to generate good synthetic images, and it will probably be used for stuff like this a lot in the future, if it isn't already.