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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

17 pointsnostrademons9 comments

Amazing that an article about this topic would totally ignore, or be totally ignorant of, the forensic expert who was brought in to explain interpolation to the judge, defense, and prosecution. While the original objection arose over pinch-to-zoom on the iPad, these were actually important questions around using a "black box" algorithm to fill in unknown pixel locations, and whether the resulting image was admissible evidence.

https://youtu.be/-bvg9HHONTI?t=20892

Were they important questions? Is the defense arguing that the video didn't really show the defendant?

IIRC the debate is about whether one of the people Rittenhouse shot was grabbing the barrel of the gun. There's no DNA on the gun, although there are burns etc. on his hand, and on the video, it maybe or maybe not looks like he is.

It's more of the mutual hemming and hawing typical of the news I've been getting about the paid participants in this trial (the lawyers and the judge.)

It certainly would be good for the person reporting on the trial to at least discuss the reasons why it isn't an entirely crazy question. Perspective and shadows could definitely be distorted by AI enhancement, and the angle is weird. It would also be an excuse for the author to talk about actual examples of AI/image enhancement creativity, like numbers being changed. I remember when Xerox printers/scanners were doing that (changing numbers on scans)[*], and I never imagined that problem would become pervasive in a lot more contexts in the near future.

[*] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238

It shocked me that the judge and the defense both preferred the term "logarithm" to describe algorithms.

it's not their field of specialization. As long as the trial is fair they are doing their job just fine.

Does anyone else remember the existence of a smartphone camera glitch one time, where the photo added another tooth in to a girl's smile (imperfectly)? I could swear somebody posted the photo online several years ago, and it eventually got confirmed, probably as an "AI"-type feature gone awry, and fixed.

I don't want to poison the well if I'm misremembering, but if so, it's a totally valid rationale to push back on trial evidence.

Even stuff like these [0][1] is reasonable to cast doubt...

[0] https://petapixel.com/2018/10/23/apple-admits-iphone-beautyg... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmonckton/2016/10/31/iphone-...

> ‘Specifically, the judge saves texts from his friends by taking screenshots and emailing them to himself. He showed one such screenshot to the courtroom today, noting that “some of them are pretty long” and “show up in my email like this, like a little ribbon,” so he zooms on them and “it’s just a blur.”’

This is ridiculous

It hurts to laugh this much.

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