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Comment by tmalsburg2 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine such an image being used as evidence is a court case. E.g. showing someone pointing a gun at another person when that actually never happened.

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Seems extremely unlikely. The phone isn’t going to make drastic alterations to reality. It’s just combining multiple exposures. It can’t make someone point a gun if they’re not pointing a gun. You could try to imagine a scenario where someone was moving extremely fast through the frame while someone was whipping a gun around at high speed in the same direction and the phone just happened to stitch two moments a fraction of a second apart such that they look slightly closer together, but to get to that point you’d still need someone pointing a gun in the same direction that someone is going.

It’s really hard to imagine a scenario where two exposures a fraction of a second apart could be stitched together to tell a completely false story, but maybe it exists. In that case, I suspect the lawyers would be all over this explanation to try to dismiss the evidence.

It’s unlikely, true. But precisely that makes it so dangerous. If such a picture is presented as evidence in a murder case, the possibility that it is telling the wrong story will be discounted and someone may go to prison for the rest of their lives.

What the comment you're replying to is saying could absolutely have happened. Imagine a "Han shot first" sort of situation: two people with guns, one shoots the other. The shooter claims it was self-defense, as the other guy went to fire first but was just slower. An iPhone picture captures the moment, but has the shooter firing, and the other guy's gun still at his side.

This is perfectly analogous to TFA--notice that the woman has enough time to move her arms into very different positions in the same composited moment.

Well, the Rittenhouse case had a very important moment when the victim admitted that, while looking at a freeze-frame view of a video taken when he was shot, he had raised his pistol which was pointed at Rittenhouse only a fraction of a second before. [0]

That photo was critical for the defense getting him to say that.

There were also concerns over wether or not zooming in on an iPad should be allowed in that case--like if a red pixel next to a blue could create a purple one, etc.

[0] https://www.denverpost.com/2021/11/08/shooting-victim-says-h...

That threat model has existed since the birth of photoshop et al.

There's a huge difference between someone intentionally altering an image according to their wishes and someone not even aware of changes that have been done.

Before, forensic experts could decide if an image had been altered in photoshop, but I guess the only sane conclusion now is that anything taken with an iphone is fake and untrustworthy.

As opposed to Samsungs which will take any vaguely circular bright white object and turn it into the moon?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...

Yeah, that's trash too. At this point I think it's fair to say you just can't trust a picture taken from a cell phone.

Yes, except it is called "Moon Mode" isn't it? The iPhone default mode isn't called "unReality Mode", so they aren't saying they are faking it. I don't know if Samsung state it is faked, but Apple definitely does not.

Scenario: It's a decade from today and phones are not just stitching together multiple photos but also using generative AI. Apple and all of the other phone makers insist the implementation is safe. The suspect appears in the photo doing something they never actually did. In the chaos of the crime, the phone was left at the crime scene where it was found by law enforcement, no chance the photo could have been photoshopped. The photo is shown as evidence in court. Without the photo, there is not enough evidence to convict. The entire case now hinges on the content of the photo. The suspect insists they never did what is shown in the photo, but it doesn't matter. The suspect is convicted, put on death row, and executed by the state. Thankfully, there is a silver lining: everyone's photos are a couple percent prettier, which helped bring more value to shareholders.

There was a thread here a little while back [0] on cryptographic proofs for photojournalism. Ultimately, that style of attestation seems the end game.

Journalists, security cameras, emergency service / military body cams and other safety systems provide a trust mechanism that enables provable authenticity from the point of capture (and some form of web of trust to weight or revoke that trust for different audiences). Anything else is assumed to be at least partial hallucination.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37398317

That doesn't really help when the edits are happening inside the camera as part of the acquisition process rather than in later manipulation.

The source (or photo mode used by it) is part of that trust.

images like this would easily be torn apart by experts brought in to testify against it. then again, for something this obvious, it probably wouldn't need an expert.

If this phenomenon is so obvious, why is this story the top post on HN? And why did it take a picture of the mirror scenario to make people aware of this issue? Hell, the article even implies that this an issue only with images of mirrors when that is of course completely false.

You seem to think that all lawyers are dumb, and unable to defend against photographic evidence. If you think a lawyer would not be able to find a witness that fully understands how the modern mobile device camera systems alter images, you're just not being honest with yourself. The Apple propaganda videos tout the fact their cameras are doing something with "AI" even if they don't tell you exactly what. To assume that people are so unawares that it took this picture is just not being honest with the conversation

No, I do not think that all lawyers are dumb. What a bizarre thing to say. Why derail an interesting conversation in such an aggressive way?

I guess we have different definitions of aggressive, but okay, wasn't meant to be aggressive. Your comment about "so obvious" seems a bit obtuse to me and is where the conversation went off the rails. Why are you even questioning how obvious this is one a source image as the one from the TFA? Just based on that, I rejected your premise of this conversation as not being very conducive to anything approaching realistic.

As far as the phone knows, there were three people in the photo, and it captured the 'best' picture of each one and composited them.

Yes, and when there actually are three people, the so-called photograph could, by the same mechanism, show them in an arrangement that never actually happened.

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