Update to the “Samsung space zoom moon shots are fake”
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Then everyone goes inside for like 2 years (pandemic), there isn’t much to take pictures of, and then by the time we start going back outside everything is actually paintings by AI artists.
Then the record from that point forward and forever hence will be one of AI, not one of humanity.
Future historians will likely place a great deal of emphasis on 2019 being the year in which we reached a forever-maximum of non-pandemic-tinged provably-human-created data. It's no reason to panic, and the mixed data sets will absolutely be representative of humanity's accomplishments as a whole... but there will be notable differences.
Is that any worse than unreliable humans? Whether they're intentionally lying or just mistaken, internet posts should always be taken with a grain of salt, for decades now.
Truth will become something similar to the roman emperors history, a million comments, blog articles condemning past rulers and CEOs as wrong all along, while praising the current instance, with similar spam in the forgotten archives.
A species ruled by madmen, one worser then the other. Praise be on the Bezos, who undid the mad world that reigned before.
Yes, I think so. Maybe not (but maybe) in terms of factual information, but in terms of opinion, analysis, arts, etc. You know, human things. The value of those things is, in my opinion, tightly couples with them being produced by humans.
And I have never stopped seeing my IRL friends in person. Those, I almost never talk with electronically.
This news sources are not just one blob or a black box. It's different people that are working for money. And we know reputable sources that have published fictionary stories as real over years(see Spiegel in Germany). Now it's really easy to unnotable use AI, so where is the reason why this will not happen?
the nyt just published a long interview with sydney in which she attempted to convince the author his wife didn't love him, which is ai-generated content; while that was clearly labeled, it will still appear in text data sets as ground truth
abundant background noise provides a lot of value for text data sets because it tells you how people talk
It just occurred to me that we're actually going through the opposite transition outlined in Pratchett's discworld. Oh the irony.
> Down in the cellar Otto Chriek picked up the dark light iconograph and looked at it again. Then he scratched it with a long pale finger, as if trying to remove something. 'Strange . . ,' he said. The imp hadn't imagined it, he knew. Imps had no imagination whatsoever. They didn't know how to lie.
From Terry Pratchett's "The Truth"
This looks a lot like what DLSS does in GPUs.
I'm torn on this: it's fake but it's a good way of getting around optics limitations in certain scenarios. Is fake detail on a photo worse than no detail for non-scientific, consumer devices?
> But I also want to include one caveat: the S21 Ultra’s Scene Optimizer will not suddenly make all 100x zoom photos look as crispy as the Moon. Samsung flat-out says the Scene Optimizer can recognize “more than 30 scenes.” That includes the following according to a spokesperson:
> Food, Portraits, Flowers, Indoor scenes, Animals, Landscapes, Greenery, Trees, Sky, Mountains, Beaches, Sunrises and sunsets, Watersides, Street scenes, Night scenes, Waterfalls, Snow, Birds, Backlit, Text, Clothing, Vehicle, Shoe, Dog, Face, Drink, Stage, Baby, People, Cat, Moon.
If it was just the normal camera 'faking' photos it'd be bad, but they literally offer a list of stuff that their zoom tab will AI-optimize. You can still use the regular camera to turn this feature off.
To me this sounds like a cool but simply misunderstood feature.
I encourage everyone interested in tech and photography to check out Villem Flusser's Towards A Philosophy of Photography [2] and of course Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [3].
[1] https://hackaday.com/2017/01/28/camera-restricta-ensures-ori... [2] (1984) PDF http://imagineallthepeople.info/Flusser_TowardsAPhilosophyof... [3] (1932) PDF https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
will be interesting to see how that works with less common animals.
I can see it getting confused with, for example, a capybara, thinking it's a dog, and filling in the details making a picture of a weird hybrid dogybara.
a decade from now kids will all be getting named with not-yet-on-google spellings of their names, to help distinguish them from AI bot personas of the same name. idiocracy calls it once again (Upgrayedd)
If the people seeing it don't know that it's fake detail, then yes, it's actively worse than no detail.
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/11/04/magazine/photography-s-ne...
> In the not-too-distant future, realistic-looking images will probably have to be labeled, like words, as either fiction or nonfiction, because it may be impossible to tell them apart. We may have to rely on the image maker, and not the image, to tell us into which category certain pictures fall.
He made an image of an intentionally blurry moon, and then used the camera to take a picture of it while it was displayed on the monitor from across the room. The resulting picture was of a sharply detailed moon!
The full moon is enhanced, while the half image remains blurry.
This is a lot like the ages-old trick of a compiler being rigged to recognize particular source file (benchmark program) and pulls out a hand-optimized assembly program.
The hacky code runing right inside the phones detecting objects, identifying faces and whatnot is often called AI.
Should have always been called "fancy algorithms" from the get-go, calling it "intelligence" opens the interpretation up for a world of misunderstandings
How do you do squinting between an engineered process and a discovered relationship. Because the neural networks are much closer to discovered than engineered.
>Because the neural networks are much closer to discovered than engineered
So is most code. Programmers in general can't engineer for shit, (half blindly) guided trial and error is the most common development paradigm
I never knew compilers did this, but I remember it being the case for some games (There was a debacle once upon a time where renaming 'Quake3.exe' to 'Quack3.exe' would reveal such shenanigans on some drivers.)
This can cause fun issues like your version of memcpy() (e.g. embedded libc) being replaced by the compiler with a call to itself: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=56888
A relatively modern example was people writing code to count set bits in a value, because older languages don't provide an intrinsic to do that and it's often useful, these days your CPU probably has a CPU instruction specifically for that, it's called "popcount" (sometimes spelled popcnt) and so it's valuable to recognise what's going on in the say six lines of C++ in your program and emit a single POPCOUNT instruction instead. If your fancy method to count bits isn't recognised your program goes slower.
The memcpy case is special because C is weird in actually trying to define this as a function, copying memory is so commonly necessary that compilers need to have a pre-baked implementation for the rest of what they do anyway, it's not a surprise that idiom recognition results in your custom memcpy being turned into the built-in memcpy, although in the case you linked that's indeed a bug.
Arguably, memcpy belongs in libgcc and not the C library. Glibc should not have to do anything in regard to memcpy, other than include the right compiler header in its stdlib.h.
This is actually a common mode of breakage of standard vision models.
It's like saying face recognition didn't recognized when you photoshopped a ear in the photo.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DownTheRabbitHol...
In a movie it also resamples the clipped audio with the actual song ran though a "live concert" audio filter, adds some nice crowd noises too.
Next-next-gen: using deep fake technology artist voices a song dedication just for you.
ControlNet is really neat
"Samsung “space zoom” moon shots are fake, and here is the proof"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601 (375 comments)
And to potentially save you a click, here's the original post:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...
https://old.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/l7ay2m/analysis_sa...
What is worrying is why would you buy something with a camera that lies at source. When you need it to tell the truth, how do you know it will be telling it?
Yeah 300+ is more comfortable for moonshots on APSC sensors, unless you are in -really- good conditions (i.e. perfect sky, far away from artificial lighting.) With 400mm I was able to take a 'pretty dang good' moonshot just outside of my house, even with a little bit of haze that day. It took a good amount of tweaking in DXO to look -great-, but it was worth it.
> What is worrying is why would you buy something with a camera that lies at source. When you need it to tell the truth, how do you know it will be telling it?
This is one of the reasons I still don't care for getting rid of my DSLRs and shoot raw [0] (Besides, PureView was the last phone camera setup I actually enjoyed.)
At the very -least-, these should be settings that have very obvious controls including turning it off by default, and Ideally should be 'opted in.' Otherwise it opens up the possibility that what is happening could count as cheating at certain photo benchmarks.
[0] Okay I also shoot raw to laugh at how awkward some of Sony's E-mount lenses are without lens profile correction applied. Looking at you SEL16F28.
Edit: Context of what you can do at ~550mm equiv. F8, ISO 250, 1/320: https://imgur.com/a/ryoqQB9
That is - any time you are shooting digital, you don't every look at what the camera saw, but at what some computer interpreted it to be.
I'd be interesting in knowing what that picture of the moon looked like right out of the raw capture.
I shoot both, RAW and JPG fine. The latter for quick sharing, with in-camera processing except for action shoots at 9 fps. JPG fine never runs into buffer limits, RAW or JPGs using processing does so. And for birds in flight or sports or similar I don't care that mich about RAW anyway.
Too many people think of raw files as analogous to slides shot in film cameras. In reality they are digital representations of the analog voltages made by sensors. In order to “see” a raw file it has to be processed which usually means demosaicing and assigning color to values based on what the camera manufacturer has provided. Oh and of course different displays will reproduce colors and brightness levels differently as well.
In reality there isn’t any such thing as an unmediated digital photograph. What is being done by smartphone cameras is a little further down the processing curve but is on the same continuum of “regular” digital photography IMO. This second test shows to me that Samsung is trying to give the photographer as sharp a picture of what they took a picture of.
And analog photographers shouldn’t get but so smug about capturing the “actual” image. Even if you shoot transparency film or collodion wet plate the resultant image is still mediated by the materials. Color reproduction, contrast, and of course the translation from 3d world/object to 2d are still enormous manipulations. Taking a picture will always be transformative compared to the original subject.
So what is considered an “accurate” photograph will always be a philosophical question. IMO I wouldn’t what Samsung has done to be “fake.” A lot of these arguments really sound like DSLR owners being upset that decent pictures can be made with pocket cameras.
As far as accurate representation goes, digital photos are court admissable as proof. And forensic ones goes through a deliberate processing pipeline, the original as taken in camera is never discarded while doing so. Which is close enough for me to be a representation of reality.
Personally, my opinion about those over-processed pictures you see on social media is the same as it is about Ssung faking the moon. I don't like neither, regardless if they are smartphone or "real" camera photos.
Presumably the camera does this directly now?
If these features were openly presented as some kind of augmented reality or editing it wouldn't be an issue, but as it stands it is no different from, for example, presenting an entertainment television network as if it were actual fact-based news, and justifying it by arguing that viewers are not looking for the truth but for something that makes them feel that they know the truth.
As for the professionals, a lot of stuff is edited yes. But there is an art to not needing to do any editing worth mentioning. I think there's some intellectual honesty in not painting over any cracks.
Agree on the camer-faking-pictures bit, who wants that?
I reckon I could have hand held it actually. The lens has pretty decent VR in it. Will wait until there's a full moon again and have another go.
And yeah I want my pictures to look natural.
Why do you “need it to tell the truth”? I would bet a large number of the non-expert consumers (99% of users) do not care.
But to defeat this own argument: just make a “AI Enhance” option in the UI…
Besides stuff like this is like pouring gasoline onto conspiracy theory movements like Flat Earthers. Those may be just 1% of the US a population. But you know what isn’t just 1%? Young Earth Creationists, who believe in a similar conspiracy theory of scientists changing the geologic record and maybe astrophysical records as well. These types have large, maybe even disproportionate, political power as well.
All this could have been OK if Samsung wasn't misleading people into believing that the picture is a result of computational photography and excellent optics.
I would love to have this in my phone's camera, but clearly identified as details added after the fact and might not represent the actual scene. It's done so well that practically no one noticed and people like MKBHD reeved it as a photography achievement.
The truth is, the non-AI implementations also fail to capture how we see the Moon and fixing it with fake details is a welcome improvement as long as it's clear that that's not actual capture.
I think the public needs to be educated that modern AI basically means to make up new data based on a statistical model from training data, i.e. fake.
https://www.tiktok.com/@shanselman/video/7209770920301399342...
Is there a process that does something akin to identifying the moon, and selecting a special filter for that? I'm pretty convinced of this. (Both by the evidence and also it's apparently advertised as such?)
What is that filter? I don't know, and the answer to this would inform "how fake" I think these images are.
It does seem to be a moon-specific treatment. It doesn't seem to be pasting a JPG of the moon and it doesn't seem to be generating the moon.
How fake it is, is, I think a measure of how dependent the result is on the specific sensor data, and how localized the changes are. If there's a moon-specific filter that's excellent at filling in data "between" sensed pixels without looking at any pixels far away (beyond, perhaps, the initial categorization as a photo of the moon where this filter would be good), that's not very fake to me.
If there was suddenly a new structure on the moon visible to the sensors, I'd want it reflected in the photo. I would consider the process very fake if it couldn't do that at all, and not very fake if it could do it reliably.
someone took a handheld picture of the moon with S21 using GCAM instead of the default app and the results are also quite awesome:
There will have to be expert witnesses to discuss any image that is brought in, if it's real or not.
I don't see the line.
I still want to see this whole thing done without Gaussian blur, which is readily reversible by even primitive algorithms.
Not true unless you know beforehand the exact kernel. Besides, there's 0 reason why a camera software be programmed to, or attempt to revert Gaussian blur.
And finally, he downsampled the image, and you can't recover from that.
Then there's the fact that a photo enhancement program has no reason to even try deconvolving gaussian blur, they should use a more appropriate kernel that better describes out of focus blur.
His original blurred moon image is available in his first post. Without even taking the detour of photographing it from a monitor, try using his image and any deconvolution software you want, and try getting anywhere near his result.