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Comment by CorrectHorseBat | Hacker News Reader

>Consider this - How could an AI system improve on techniques that optimize for the Human Visual System? A very large part of our multimedia compression today comes from strategically sacrificing information that is subjectively worthless to humans.

Exactly that. AI could recognize what is important in a frame and use less compression there, while using pattern generation for high entropy parts which are not important.

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We truly don't need AI to tell us what is important or not. We already know this, objectively. It's mathematically defined as the visible spectrum of the a available information, adjusted with relative high/low thresholds for compression level.

I think when they said important, they meant distinct or unique. For example, Vin Diesel driving muscle cars is the "important" part of the fast and furious movies, the city/plot/most of the supporting characters are details that could be simplified and reconstructed. An algorithm that generated FF movies could mostly hallucinate silly reasons for Vin Diesel to drive cars and shoot guns, with little real coherency or consistency and I bet the fanbase would love it.

In the context of video, that means not spending bits on things like wall textures, plants, buildings, crowds, details of misc objects, etc.

Mathematical information density is not the same as important. A picture of white noise is mathematically very dense in information, but only median an standard deviation are important to us.

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