Face retouching settings should be off by default
blog.google
blog.google
https://qz.com/1657653/alipay-to-add-beauty-filters-to-facia...
Basically, it's about a reversible procedure called "calli" that turns off the neurological response to symmetry, smoothness, and "aesthetic" of a human face. So someone with the procedure can recognize different faces, but they don't feel any better about a pretty face than an ugly one.
The story follows a girl who had calli done as a young child, and then decided to go to college with it turned off. When she's there, there's a push on campus to mandate the procedure, to combat "lookism." The story is written like a documentary film, so it has little snippets of interviews, news articles, etc. about the debate.
The range of emotions we get from looking at other people's faces is intrinsically worth saving. But, people get a huge advantage from being good-looking. It's effectively discrimination to consider people who are good looking more trustworthy, nicer, etc, yet all of us do -- it's hard wired. The world is not really fair to someone with a bad looking face.
These apps aren't calli but they do mediate how we see the world, ourselves, and others to a huge degree. I don't envy any middle school girl who has to navigate this landscape. Anyway, I highly recommend the story, it was such an interesting way of looking at the issue.
That sounds incredibly dystopian.
I mean, yes, this hypothetical procedure does sound dystopian on its face (haha). But then again, imagine if you just judged people by how nice they actually were, not by what their face looked like? Imagine if you were evaluated by the merits of your mind, of you, not the 'flawed' representation of you (your face) given to you by your DNA?
I've been helped enormously in almost every area of my life by the way I look and how I'm able to present myself physically. Much of that is because of my DNA -- something I didn't work for or ask for. It was given to me for free. Likewise, others are deprived through no fault of their own. Of course, that's the way it is. I like being attractive and having attractive friends and romantic partners. But what if it didn't matter? Would my life be richer?
Do you believe that accidents of genes (and actions taken by the mother at times) affect brain development? If so, aren't we just moving the problem to a different body part ?
(keeping the devil's advocate train going )
I hope that some day in the future we'll look back on the way poor people are treated now with the same horror we have today if we hear a black or gay person was refused healthcare or another service.
That's Harrison Bergeron territory. Sorry, you can't go on a vacation to France because your kids might learn something.
For example, we are currently living the idea of capitalism taken to the extreme, where one man can own a trillion dollars while others can't afford healthcare or education, and it's clearly becoming more and more nonsensical to allow this. Let's try swinging the needle in the other direction for a while.
A baseline for human needs ( food, shelter, access to health and opportunities to develop oneself) can be codified into law but we'll always find a way to express those biases at the higher levels IMO.
Which is the best argument for a minimal legal ethical codes. Any system can be hacked, especially those designed by humans. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. So...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance
[2] https://www.hugomontenegro.com/blog/the-absurdity-of-free-wi...
My patchwork strategy nowadays is "Nature is always unfair on the individual level. Leverage your advantages to make life better for those less fortunate." and hope enough people do this to improve the world.
Citation needed? It's almost-certainly net-enjoyable - but, when you go on to acknowledge that the mere fact of those emotions leads to discrimination against some people, how do you justify this statement other than "those emotions are natural"?
To be clear, I am _not_ saying that I would support mandatory calli - forcibly changing someone's neurological responses is an astonishingly dangerous precedent to set; as another commenter points out, that would be terribly dystopian - but I don't think I can agree with your specific statement.
Regardless - this sounds like a fascinating story, I'll have a look - thanks!
It's important to note that we're hard wired because it was evolutionary beneficial to "push out" people who look bad/incorrect/not-normal. If you have a gene that mutates then it's possible you could have other mutations that make you not suitable reproductively so it became ingrained to avoid those who look bad to get genes that would produce more fit offspring.
As for the article itself, I find myself gravitating towards not trusting Google's (or such org's) motives in this. After all, if such a touchup feature were activated by default, it would skew Google's face dataset away from real faces and embed a notion of "Calli" in their face models.
So a question of additional filter being on by default is really a matter of preference, because so many filters are already on anyway.
My way takes 10 minutes vs. an app taking a millisecond, but that’s all in the name of making the image look flawless without looking retouched.
Size 5 in Brand A is tight so consumers prefer Brand B who has size 5 clothes that fit better.
"But vanity waist sizing is so entrenched, it couldn't possibly be changed overnight, at least not without a government mandate. The only solution seems to be a gradual, year-by-year shaving of quarter-inch by quarter-inch until, in 2021, men's pants finally correspond with the label numbers — conveniently just in time for the New World Order's switch to mandatory full jumpsuits."
That sounds terrible, but it could still be an improvement over 2020.
They actively seek to make women insecure about their appearance, and collect advertising from outfits that promise to correct it.
One of the promoted tropes is that overspending on a putative remedy is giving yourself a treat, rather than giving the vendor a treat.
https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/
I am skeptical about this. I'm co-owner of a gym and I don't think the people there--men or women--who care a lot about how they look, are depressed or insecure at all when they see Instagram photos. And many of them spend a lot of time building an Instagram brand.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair
That applies to... 100% of all marketing. Not just the cosmetics industry.
Selling 5 cents' worth of scented lanolin for $20, which no one can tell you used, is not even the sort of "price-signaling" that usually motivates absurd overpayment. That it succeeds indicates deep pathology.
A less publicized example of this is what's done in music production. Most people aren't singers, so it's not as obvious, but the perfection you hear in any track produced in the last 20 years sets pretty unrealistic ideals for even a trained voice.
Unlike the magazine example, there isn't a compelling ulterior motive. They just wanted to sell more CDs.
Hm, I find myself unable to say whether I agree or not. I would say I am 70% confident that these filters can negatively affect people's wellbeing (based on my intuition/bias), and 15% confident that we can get a scientifically valid answer to that question (based on the track record of social psychology and related disciplines).
How could the likes as samsung switch this feature on by default like it was some minor optimization?
How many customers did you gain because you didn't require them to turn a switch on? Was it worth it?
When you turn on automatic retouching, everyone suddenly feels like they take professional/promotional quality pictures.
I find that people say retouched or filtered photos are not “real life”, but I’ve definitely seen people in real life who are just as attractive as any person that uses a filter. It can definitely be “real life”, but encountering these people is rare enough that people assume that level of perfection cannot possibly exist. In reality it just doesn’t exist at the frequency in which filtered images would have you believe.
So retouching is totally fine if google does it. But how dare Korean and Chinese manufacturers (who are targeting a certain market) use the same techniques on faces?!?! The hypocrisy is strong with this one.
https://www.sv.uio.no/psi/english/research/news-and-events/n...
Although, there are more concrete results about surrounding environment than people specifically.
Anything more I can read about this?
I have seen some stuff on impact of social media standards and how it affects people but is there anything separate? A study that removes social media and then test out filter applied pictures?
Original post: https://www.sheknows.com/health-and-wellness/articles/113866...
Both are true.
Beauty in the world really matters. Both people and things.
But expectations being set to high on oneself is bad.
Can you have one without the other and how much are each weighted.
You can also throw in beauty is a service industry that creates jobs and personal satisfaction. Which every UBI talk says is what we will be doing when we can't work.
For example, instagram algorithms specifically pick certain kind of body features and people to throw in your feed.
https://voxeurop.eu/en/the-skin-bias-in-instagram/
Algorithms could also be causing a significant cognitive dissonance by making people feel excluded. If I don't see enough people that shares some resemblance to locals (however beautiful or filtered they are), there is some stress.
I'm a good looking guy (in shape, did modelling, etc.) and I just can't understand it. It's like makeup to me... wrinkles, freckles, scars, and everything else have never affected my perception of beauty because I tend to like an exotic, atypical appearance. Health and physical fitness have a much larger impact on attractiveness for me and all this stuff just seems like a poor imitation of what it actually is to look healthy.
I don't trust anything coming from a smartphone camera now. Even my own phones.
Maybe related: I've noticed on iPhones and Samsungs that I cannot get a picture to match reality. I feel like it was easier to get a picture with colors that closely matched reality YEARS ago. Why have cameras gone downhill? Or is it my imagination?
When I take a photo of the grass and sky with any modern smartphone it never looks right. I try and try and try to adjust the settings and I can just never get a good photo anymore.
Edit: Example: I couldn't take a picture of the smoke on the West coast recently. The dark grey and orange skies would all come out looking blue or something. It's like the 'camera' is telling me I'm f'ing crazy for taking a picture of smoky skies, and surely I want to pretend the smoke isn't there at all! That's why I'm taking a picture right? So I can pretend that reality isn't real. I have no photos that match the smoke. I have only my memory and other people's photos. WTF.
That's automatic white balance adjustment. It's not used to an orange sky, so it can't figure out what color should be considered "white". If you want an example of why this is important, turn off automatic WB and take a photo under fluorescent light followed by a photo lit by candles.
I have no idea about Android phones, but iPhones do some amount of denoise, contrast adjustment, and a few other limited postprocessing steps automatically.
I know I'll come across as pedantic, but you'll have trouble doing that even with DSLRs. Whether you're doing film or digital imagery, you're not capturing reality. With camera sensors, the raw data you capture (RGB brightness for each pixel, for example), needs to have some color/brightness/contrast curve applies to make it look realistic (i.e. linear will not look like reality at all). Each manufacturer picks their own curve, and then also has options (vivid, etc) - and some of them do pick less realistic options for defaults as customers think they make for better photos.
Not to mention tricks to fix overexposed pixels, etc. There's quite a bit of manipulation done before you get the JPG.
Cell phone cameras are akin to cheaper digital cameras that used to be (and perhaps still are) on the market - where you don't have much control on this. This is not new to smartphones - it's just that smartphones have more processing power to do more.
Long time photographers know this. It's not "capture reality", but "how much deviation from reality am I willing to accept", with 0 not being an option.
You can install an alternative photo app like Halide to take control of every variable, even aperture size, but it's a bit of a hassle when any 'dumb' camera would do the job.
That was due to automatic white balance, which is perhaps the most basic and low-tech automatic adjustment on your phone. We're talking deep AI tech from the 90s, if not earlier.
I ran into the same problem on that day, so I googled "iphone manual white balance", got an app that looked decent (Obscura), and took my pictures without issue. Try that next time. (But get another app, Obscura literally takes half a minute to load for some reason.)
Even the old Panasonic digital camera I bought 13 years ago has a smooth skin option.
https://www.instructables.com/Prank-a-Cop-with-a-Clown-Nose/
Nice way to get shot.
There are photo booths for taking "fun" pictures, not IDs pictures.
BTW the name "ki-re-i" is maybe comes from "kirei" (means beautiful).
As for the documentary, although friends have recommended I see it I am up to my neck in propaganda from every which way from news about this, a documentary about that, so-called expert said so-and-so, et cetera. Just the stupidity on HN is enough for me to call it a day sometimes. I'll sit this one out.
Addiction plays a big role here, and the fact, that many people in the industry never seemed to care about how addictive software can be.
I searched for "suicide rates in young people" and found lots of info, including https://time.com/5550803/depression-suicide-rates-youth/ which cites and links to a study published in The Journal of Abnormal Psychology
From the article:
>Between 2009 and 2017, rates of depression among kids ages 14 to 17 increased by more than 60%, the study found. The increases were nearly as steep among those ages 12 to 13 (47%) and 18 to 21 (46%), and rates roughly doubled among those ages 20 to 21.
>Among young people, rates of suicidal thoughts, plans and attempts all increased significantly, and in some cases more than doubled, between 2008 and 2017, the study found.
>These findings were based on data collected from more than 600,000 people by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual nationwide mental-health survey conducted by a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
>What’s causing today’s young people so much anguish? “This is always a tough question to answer, as we can’t prove for sure what the causes are,” Twenge says. “But there was one change that impacted the lives of young people more than older people, and that was the growth of smartphones and digital media like social media, texting and gaming.”
Note 1: The person quoted above is one of the study authors. Note 2: The modern smartphone (iPhone 1) was first released in 2009 (edit — correction: 2007).
This tells me that there wasn't a significant increase in the rate of actual suicides, or they would have mentioned it.
We also changed the title from the clickbait of "Google says 'beauty' filters are bad for your mental health" and the bland corpspeak of "More controls and transparency for your selfies" to what appears to be a representative sentence from the article.
> Essentially, Smart HDR was choosing the wrong base frame for HDR processing when you took a selfie. Instead of choosing a frame with a short shutter speed to freeze motion and preserve detail, it would sometimes choose a frame with longer shutter speed. The front camera also does not have optical image stabilization, so it takes blurrier shots at the same shutter speed as the rear, stabilized camera. The result is a loss of detail that looks like smoothing on the front camera.
Google has all kinds of activity tracking enabled by default on Android phones. I wonder what impact that has on mental health.
I can't say anything with absolute numbers but subreddits such as privacy, privacytools, degoogle, minimalism, and alike places have seen massive growth in recent years and I regularly find people (especially teenagers) who are severely affected by this.
So I wonder how long will it take google or any other tech companies to take an opt in approach to tracking.
But it's true it is a bit different for BigCo. Not only they watch, they also have an active role by modifying what you see - e.g. the ads and news they display [3].
Does this qualify as "outsized impact" or do you want moar?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
[2] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2017/01/the-watchers
|3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/facebook-...
> Workers experienced a series of lighting changes in which productivity was said to increase with almost any change in the lighting. This turned out not to be true.
> ...a series of changes in work structure were implemented (e.g., changes in rest periods) in a group of five women. But this was a methodologically poor, uncontrolled study that did not permit any firm conclusions to be drawn.[4]
> This interpretation was dubbed "the Hawthorne effect," although the data does not support that view.
I guess that's par for the course.