Hacker News Reader

Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I have no objection with what we have today either but it does feel slippery slope-y, especially in the AI era. Before we know it our cameras won’t just be picking the best frame for each person, it’ll be picking the best eye, tweaking their symmetry, making the skin tone as aesthetically pleasing as possible, etc etc etc. It was always this way to an extent but now that we’ve given up the pretence of photos being “real” it feels inevitable to me.

I’m reminded of that scene in WALL-E where it shows the captain portraits as people get fatter and fatter. It’s clearly inaccurate: over time the photos should show ever more attractive, chisled captains. They’d still be obese in real life though.

View on HN

While I don't use TikTok I often see videos from there and it's really spooky to me how aggressive and omnipresent filtering seems to have become in that community. Even mundane non-fashion non-influencer "vlog" style content is often heavily filtered and, even more scary IMO, I often don't notice immediately and only catch it if there's a small glitch in the algorithm for instance when the person moves something in front of their face. And sometimes you can tell that the difference from their real appearance is very significant.

I really wonder what's that doing to insecure teenagers with body issues.

That already happens, in realtime. FaceTime uses eye gaze correction, Cisco is all in on AI codecs for image and audio compression, and other vendors are on similar tracks too.

When you talk to a client, a colleague or a loved one we’re on the verge of you conversing with a model that mostly represents their image and voice (you hope). The affordances of that abstraction layer will only continue to deepen from here too.

> When you talk to a client, a colleague or a loved one we’re on the verge of you conversing with a model that mostly represents their image and voice (you hope)

Wow, this threw me for a loop. There’s not much difference between talking to a heavily filtered image of a person and texting with them. Both the image and the words are merely representations of the person. Even eye-to-skin perceiving someone is a representation of their “person” to a degree. The important part is that “how” and “how much” the representation differs from reality is known to the observer

This is nothing new. Very old examples are the xerox machines that accidentally changed numbers on scanned documents, and speech coding for low bit rate digital audio over radio, phone, and then VoIP.

The Xerox comparison is apt, but importantly that is text rather than direct expression.

Media processing is experiencing a fundamental change though. Traditional compression removes information. What's happening now creates new information and interacts with semantic context.

> I have no objection with what we have today either but it does feel slippery slope-y, especially in the AI era. Before we know it our cameras won’t just be picking the best frame for each person, it’ll be picking the best eye, tweaking their symmetry, making the skin tone as aesthetically pleasing as possible, etc etc etc.

What we have today already includes phone cameras that will add teeth to the image of your smiling newborn, or replace your image of what looks like the moon with stock photography of the moon.

> I’m reminded of that scene in WALL-E where it shows the captain portraits as people get fatter and fatter. It’s clearly inaccurate: over time the photos should show ever more attractive, chiseled captains.

Interestingly, the opposite thing happened with official depictions of Roman emperors.

Phones over-beautifying faces by default already happened with the iPhone XS, and it wasn't received well. See #beautygate: https://www.imore.com/beautygate

"Over-beautifying" never happened. Noise reduction/smoothing happens in camera processing even if you don't try to do it, because it's trying to preserve signal and that's not signal. If you want that noise, you have to actually put in processing that adds it back.

Sure it did, no wrinkles, no moles unless huge, skin tone like after 2 weeks vacation in Carribean. What previously had to be done in photoshop to make people look younger is now done automatically, for every photo, and you can't turn it off.

They call it 'instagram look' for quite some time, Apple is the worst among all phone manufacturers (in form of furthest from actual ugly reality, but a lot of people got used to it and actually prefer it now), but all of them are making it.

I promise there is nothing in the camera trying to make you look even a little better than normal. Especially not removing moles; people use their phones to send pictures to their doctors, so that would kill your customers with melanoma.

If you want pores you need a higher resolution sensor, but even most of those have physical low pass (blur) filters because most people don't like moiré artifacts. Could try an A7R or Fuji X-series.

It’s called noise reduction, and has been done by the most primitive cell phones since forever.

Yes, it actually did. And as it says in the link:

>".... if they can detect and preserve fabric, rope, cloud, and other textures, why not skin texture as well?"

The phone changed the image on skin and not on random other things that wasn't a face. That is a filter, not normal image processing, when it happens only on X but not on Y. The only way to not get this filter on the phone is using RAW.

> And as it says in the link

That is the opinion of an uninformed tech writer, and even besides that, he's not claiming it did happen but just that it could possibly happen.

In this case you do have someone who knows how it works, that someone being me.

> The phone changed the image on skin and not on random other things that wasn't a face.

There are some reasons you'd want to process faces differently, namely that viewers look at them the most, and that if you get the color wrong people either look sickly or get annoyed that you've whitewashed them. Also, when tone mapping you likely want to treat the foreground and background differently, and people are usually foreground elements.

>There are some reasons you'd want to process faces differently

Yes and then you have applied a filter.

It's done to make it more realistic, not less.

You are arguing semantics. A filter is a filter is a filter. Apple applied filters to phone images. Your definition of "more realistic" might be on your Filter Positive List, but it is no less a filter than one that make skin whiter or breasts smaller.

It’s not slippery slope-y, it is slippery slope.

This is not at all like DALL-e and midjourney, this is literally putting together multiple images taken shortly after another, but instead of dumbly putting it on another as it would manually happen in photoshop with transparent layers, it takes the first photo as a key, and merges info from the other photos into the first where it makes sense (e.g. the background didn’t move, so even this blurry frame is useful for improving that).

This is just dishonest to mix AI into that.

Samsung phones (and I guess iphones too) already do this lmao.

https://www.insider.com/samsung-phones-default-beauty-mode-c...

My favorite one is the phones that put a fake picture of a moon in pictures where the moon is detected!

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...

> My favorite one is the phones that put a fake picture of a moon in pictures where the moon is detected!

This is just about as wrong as saying Stable Diffusion contains a stock photo of the moon it spits out when you prompt it with "the moon".

They work the same way. Samsung's camera has a moon mode, so it gets the prior (a much, much lower quality camera raw than you think it's getting), it processes it with a bias (this noise is a Gaussian distribution centered on the moon), and you get a result (an image that looks like the moon).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com