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Comment by yborg | Hacker News Reader

After reading a lot of ChatGPT-like marketing cruft, once concludes that they deny nothing here. If you take a photo with the image of the unobscured Moon in it on a Samsung camera, the Moon will be replaced by a generated image of the Moon created in-camera. The details of how this is done aren't really important if you are wondering if the photons reflected from the Moon that hit the sensor are represented in the image file that ultimately is output.

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Here's a kind of barometer I came up with: imagine taking a photo of the moon, and the phone simply outright replaces the photo with a downloaded pristine astrophotography shot from a cloud server, and shows it to the user instead.

How close a phones actual behaviour is to that dystopia, versus the other extreme of simply dumping the raw pixels from the sensor on the screen, that's how messed up that phone is compared to others on the market.

Right now, Samsung appears to be way up the bad end of such a scale.

At least for the moon... that is, the one situation we know about because someone jumped through hoops to discover it.

What happens to photo attribution, credit, copyright, etc in these situations?

If I take a picture of the moon with my astrophotography setup, I can release that with whatever licensing I choose. If someone takes a photo with their Samsung phone, and it replaces that image with a stock photo that has been very permissibly licensed, they would not be able to do anything with that image that does not fall in line with the license. But who's being told what the license is?

It's one thing if you come up with an app where you take a picture of something on your mobile, but it returns the exact same thing photographed by a professional with much higher quality than mobile, that would be one thing as everyone would understand the situation. This is pretending you have a better camera than you have and selling it as a better camera even though your camera isn't really doing the work.

I'm looking forward to a bright future when I take a selfie, and get replaced with a cloud-server-supplied shot of a smarter, handsomer, better dressed, not-graying-in-the-hair version of myself.

Also your prettified self is in an exotic location doing cooler stuff than you really are.

Great, so I have to pay for their exotic lifestyle as well? Where does it end??

Well, your friends will all be doing the same thing, so you'll need AI tools to de-falsify their selfies. Eventually, it will even learn what you would have liked/favorited/retweeted and just do it for you. From that point your social media presence is a self-licking ice cream cone and you can just ignore it and hang out in the Discord/IRC/group text.

To an extent filters are already doing this... and people love it.

I don't get that from what they state.

Quote: "The engine for recognizing the moon was built based on a variety of moon shapes and details, from full through to crescent moons, and is based on images taken from our view from the Earth."

This says the engine was built from that training, and later on they state that the engine is applied to multiple pictures your camera takes. Where specifically in the article does it say that images not from your camera are applied to your final image? An engine is a process, not necessarily a set of images applied to your images.

It is a processing method, the mechanics of which were ironed out processing other images.

Apple does this kind of retouching too as I understand it, but only for bokeh effects and it’s not something they hide.

Apple does "this kind of" retouching, slapping a professionally shot sticker of the thing you phone-camera'd on top of your photograph so it looks pro?

They do nearly the same thing, as I understand it. Samsung doesn’t specifically improve the moon, it’s just one of the things their filter has learned to improve. Apple is doing pretty much the same thing except getting away with it; it’s not only their bokeh as I understand it.

I feel like this is signature Apple, and most people who know much about digital photography (especially in phones) is aware that Apple has fairly distinct processing techniques – not necessarily distinct optics.

What Samsung did was relatively covert in comparison.

It’s a specific touch up photography mode.

If you draw your own moon with new craters in different spots, it’ll touch up your fake moon, so it’s generating new texture, not replacing the moon with a preexisting bitmap.

If you don’t like it, don’t shoot pictures in the artificially enhanced scenic optimizer mode. It has an on off button…

There’s no problem here expect corporate transparency and shoddy journalism headlines.

Even if you take a picture that isn't of the moon, it might be replaced by a generated image of the Moon. The original proof that demonstrated this nonsense was happening wasn't photographing the moon: ce n'est pas une pipe, AI!

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