The Samsung phone wasn’t a technological advancement, it was sheer fraud.
A camera is supposed to take pictures of what it sees.
Imagine going to a restaurant, ordering French onion soup, and getting a bowl of brown food coloring in water.
A camera is supposed to take pictures of what it sees.
Imagine going to a restaurant, ordering French onion soup, and getting a bowl of brown food coloring in water.
Feels like that’s just a matter of expectations.
A phone used to be a device for voice communications. It’s right there in the Greek etymology, “phonē” for sound. But 95% of what people do today on devices called phones is something else than voice.
Similarly, if people start using cameras more to produce images of things they want rather than what exists in front of the lens, then that’s eventually what a camera will mean. Snapchat thinks of themselves as a camera company, but the images captured within their apps are increasingly synthesized.
(The etymology of “camera” already points to a journey of transformation. A photographic camera isn’t a literal room, as the camera obscura once was.)
They would say "ὀργάνων φωναί", "φωνὴ βροντῆς", "φωνὴ ὑδάτων" and so on for example.
Courts, for example. Forensic science was revolutionized by widespread adoption of photography leading to a reduction of the importance given to witnesses. Who also hallucinate what might have happened.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not super keen on AI type stuff in cameras as a whole. The line is muddy though. A smartphone camera straight up can’t capture the moon well, or at all. If it then looks more like it did in real life after processing is that better or worse than my above example?
I'm by no means against the feature. Hell, I shoot 90% of my family photos in Portrait mode on my Galaxy phone, which does some creative bluring and probably some other magic[0]. I just really appreciate being able to turn the magic on or off myself. That, and knowing exactly what the magic is[1].
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[0] - I don't know what exactly it does, but switching from normal to Portrait mode is all it takes for my photos to suddenly look amazing, as judged by my wife, vs. plain sucking.
[1] - See e.g. "scene optimizer" in Galaxy phones. It's a toggle on normal photo mode. I have no first clue what it does, I can't see any obvious immediate difference between shots taken with vs. without that feature.
Any environmental lighting, color and texture of the desk, and all other visual detail are only a distraction.
So if the camera would recognize this intent and just give me the receipt looking like it came from a scanner, that would in fact be a great improvement. So I think your example is in fact a point in favor of having AI meddle with most photos that people shoot.
The important property is how the pixels are correlated with the physical reality being imaged - because the goal is to reason and learn about the depicted subject though information in the photo. Heuristics and algorithms for demosaicing, white balance, auto-brightness/dynamic range, lens collection, removing motion blur, etc. improve the correlation or improve our ability to see it. This is fine, though you need to be aware at time which properties of the image are to be treated as relative vs. absolute.
This is also a far cry from having your camera think, "I'm a consumer camera! Normies often shoot pictures of the Moon, so this fuzzy circle must be it; let me paste a high-resolution photo of the Moon there", or "gee, normies often shoot sportsball, so this green thing must be astroturf, and this grey blob is probably the ball", etc.
Yes, but that doesn’t imply “A camera is supposed to take pictures of what it sees”, only “cameras sometimes are supposed to take pictures of what they see”.
Some of us prefer a nice picture over a more exact record of what was; some of us will even argue that such manipulated pictures are better at capturing what was precisely because they sacrifice some of the physical reality for the non-physical essence of a moments one’s memory of such a moment.
That moon photo is a nice example. Smartphone cameras aren’t very good at capturing what the full moon looks like in our memory.
Welcome to England!
But IMO it’s a point worth bringing up, most people have no idea how digital photography works and how difficult it is to measure, quantify and interpret the analog signal that comes from a camera sensor to even resemble an image.
I would object slightly less if they made a model (3D or AI) that captures the whole side of the Moon in high detail, and used that, combined with precise location and date/time, to guide resolving the blob in camera input into a high-resolution rendering *that matches, with high accuracy and precision, what the camera would actually see if it had better optics and sensor*. It still feels like faking things, but at least the goal would be to match reality as close as possible.
Probably not exactly the same side and orientation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libration#Lunar_libration: “over time, slightly more than half (about 59% in total) of the Moon's surface is seen from Earth due to libration”
People were commenting on that thread how apple phone ie mirrored only bunny within bigger picture of a bunny in the grass (thats rather hilarious 'bug'), and we all know how apple consistently removes all moles and wrinkles, changes completely skin tone and overall tonality like every single picture looks like its taken in the golden sunset hour. Ie that nasty samsung is much more truthful when it comes to this, including latest flagships.
That's outright lying too, IMHO much worse - moon is tidally locked so showing exactly same side with same features for millions of years, so they were adding details that are there, just impossible to see on non-stabilized tiny plastic lens&sensor combo in the night.
Making somebody 20 years younger, much prettier and changing their overall look on most important feature we humans have, doing it by default without any real option to turn it off, does a lot of long term body-perception damage in young folks.
Isn't that like 80% of the mass food industry and 99% of the fast food industry.
You wouldn't like the picture of what it sees. The lens is just not big enough. Even the pro raw and other features that phone introduced apply processing.
If people wanted cameras to actually take what it sees, then we wouldn't have autofocus, photoshop or instagram filters.
The goal of a cell phone camera is to capture what you are experiencing, not to literally record what light strikes the cmos chip.
All images taken with digital cameras have been filtered by a pipeline of advanced algorithms. Nobody ever looks at "what the camera sees". What kind of savage would look at an image before demosaicing the Bayer pattern? (Except from the people who work in demosaicing, of course.)
Bad example. Autofocus makes changes to the light that goes into the camera, not just the data that comes out.
> photoshop or instagram filters
Bad examples. Those both give the user a before-and-after comparison so the user can decide what kind of alterations are reasonable or desirable.
Arguably so do the AI things (i.e. they take multiple shots at different exposure and composit them).
The point is, we have ceeded manual control of photography to automated systems a long time ago. Most people are happy with that choice, as phone cameras serve a cultural function and are not scientific instruments.
Do you think its recording some other light?
B) the light has been modified based on an algorithm, causing the camera to capture different things. Its not just the light as it would be by itself.
In terms of the output of the camera the effect of this is much more significant than the AI stuff being complained about.