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Comment by IvanK_net | Hacker News Reader

In the future, it might be extremely hard to find a camera which records exactly what is in front of it :D

The year is 2036, when dialed up to maximum space saving, the latest generation of smart phones now turn camera pictures to a textual description and later when you want to view them, re-generate them on the fly using a text2image model. Not that "saving space" really means something, the phones refuse to unlock if they don't have an internet connection and store all your data on multiple cloud servers anyway (one for each five eye country).

It's already 14 eyes, and it'll be 195 eyes by then

194. That one country will not be invited.

*rolls the random number generator* What has Senegal done?

Ask me in 10 years. If I call it now it will make the prophecy fullfil itself even earlier.

It's one Monarch, but many eyes. All information flows to the Crown.

That one monarch is not a person or organization of people. It's an aggregation of all the loosely connected ones, competing on some things, coordinated on others, but you, the end user are never the beneficiary. That, my old school human friend, is the one commandment no one challenges. With all those players locked into a Nash equilibrium, no one can do anything about this, while all humans complain that things are not the way they should be.

The constitutional monarchies respect each others' land ownership and colonies, but in terms of actual power the British Crown dwarfs everything, especially if one correctly recognizes the USA as their vassal state.

Outside of this there are few strongmen-led states of non-royal blood, of which China is the most important one.

And then there is Switzerland, which is part of the democratically-pacified buffer zone around Liechtenstein ;)

Let's hope the people at the top don't become too crazy.

This is conspiracy theory territory. The USA is not a vassal state of the crown in any way at all.

I just note that one of the few people to face fallout from the Epstein scandal is Prince Andrew, because he's not inside the US unaccountability protection field.

The British crown is powerless apart from their money. The USA is a vassal state of Israel, not Britain.

It won't even have a camera. Could just infer from location, time, and orientation data.

The ultimate image compression algorithm: The txt

A lot of smartphones support raw format.

It's fascinating to see how much post-processing gets done.

There was a post on HN a few months ago showing the stages of post-processing on a photo of a Christmas tree in a room - the original photo was unrecognisable.

I would find the link, but I’m balancing my phone on my knee while trying to eat dinner and pretend I’m not playing with my phone while eating dinner…

It's this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415225

Often the "RAW" output is still DSP'd, just less (e.g. only debayering + noise reduction).

With the rise of AI-generated content I would actually love a camera with no post-processing by default and a watermarking system that proves the picture is authentic. I can see Apple going that way eventually.

Eh, there are plenty of third party camera apps which do that (See: Halide and their Prozess Zero). I doubt a built-in one will go that way.

Well, they do their best, they don't do any userspace post-processing. They can't really help whatever the firmware in the camera and/or the camera driver are already doing.

It's not really possible to have zero processing of an image. At some point you have to interpret the sensor data and turn it in to a JPEG. The line people decide an image is "processed" is pretty subjective though. It's somewhere between the camera deciding what the white balance / exposure is, and AI replacing the sun with a moon.

raw images exist

You can't see a raw image though. Any time you look at an image, decisions had to be made about how to interpret that raw image.

It's still not a jpeg

Any file format or data structure you can display on the screen is processed. The whole point is the debate around phone processing is not as clear cut as photos being processed vs unprocessed.

only because you're arguing in bad faith. The layperson does not consider the result of standard sensor debayering to be "processed".

The layperson also doesn't really consider the result of their smartphone app to be "processed", until they get slapped in the face with it. The layperson's intuition isn't reliable.

The layperson doesn’t have any idea what they are talking about so it’s hard to pull a coherent statement out of it.

People claim they want unprocessed photos but it’s not clear what they even mean by that. I think we can rule things like ai replacing the sun with a moon as obviously too far, but most phones like the iPhone aren’t AI generating or filtering things.

Someone manually selecting an exposure, white balance, and tint in Lightroom isn’t any less real than letting the camera do that automatically because the camera doesn’t know which values are real either.

The line I draw is at semantic editing. Manipulating images based on abstract geometric or statistical features like edges or color histograms is acceptable. Attempting to guess what those features mean is not. Traditional sharpening, color balance correction, focus stacking, lens distortion correction, etc. is fine. Red eye removal, skin tone correction, traditional dodging and burning, replacing a detected moon with a higher resolution photo, etc. is not. Unlabeled semantic editing is dishonest. AI image processing does not distinguish between geometric and semantic features, so it's always unacceptable, even for simple tasks like sharpening.

The one exception I make is cropping, because photographers have always had the ability to choose where to point the camera. Cropping based on meaning is not dishonest because it's inherent in the process of photography.

That doesn't seem like a very sharp line (hah). "Abstract geometrical or statistical features like edges" have semantic meaning. An "edge" is just an area of the image with a high derivative, but as soon as you use that information to process it in some way, you are making some implicit assumption about what this statistical feature means - the boundary of an object, a discontinuity in depth, etc.

There is no dividing line between syntax and semantics - semantics is just syntax scaled. Godel proved it, LLMs exploit it.

If I run an unsharp mask filter I'm not making any decision about what individual edges mean. I might look at the result and decide to apply more or less sharpening, but that's still not "semantic editing", because the edit itself only sees derivatives.

How does that watermark feature work if you can just point the camera at an AI-generated image?

One of the proposals I saw was using the lidar to capture a depth map. You could also embed the GPS location.

Apple is apparently working on the latter, although it'll be opt-in and it's unclear whether it will also reduce the processing (I hope it does!): https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/10/ios-27-apple-reference-...

This is a feature a lot of companies are looking in to right now. It's less about reducing processing and more about proving something is real and not AI generated. The iphone processing doesn't straight up generate things that aren't real.

It's also something I've been looking into. I've completely broken Google's implementation and I can sign any file as if it were real, more details will be public in the coming weeks.

Signatures are nice, but the contents of the image still matter. Any signs of manipulation should still be treated with suspicion, even if they're "legitimate" edits. The best way to avoid such signs is to have the bare minimum processing.

The technology is fundamentally flawed. It's essentially DRM that relies on making the signing key hard to access.

This is also my opinion. However, I still think it's worth raising the bar for plausible fakes. Minimising processing is another way to raise that bar (or at least, lower the floor). It's also not something you can do by default, because consumers demand image processing.

Every dedicated camera is like this, more so if you shoot in raw.

There's also a lot of confusion around the processing here. The iPhone is mostly just taking multiple pictures and stacking them on top of each other to make up for the poor performance of the small hardware, denoising, and then applying a mask to subjects to lift shadows and adjust skin tones. This is the same kind of edit a photographer would do in Lightroom. It's not straight up AI generating content in the image.

Sadly Android phones are willing to pull cheap tricks to show better numbers or look better in some comparative youtube video so they pull this stuff.

Leica and Sony offer this as “Content Credentials” and anti-forgery digital signatures done on camera. It’s also been standard for many years for digital cameras used in criminal evidence procedures, Olympus tough series IIRC.

Me I just switched back to film. It’s about a buck a picture but I like the results I get, I’d rather have 30 photos than 300 to look through anyway.

If it's watermarked then it's by definition inauthentic. Watermarking is in-band signal manipulation.

Instead of watermarking you could add a cryptographic signature.

On Android, you can use OpenCamera. Optionally save in RAW and process in desktop RAW software.

Alternatively, buy a mirrorless or DSLR with some decent lenses.

Telling if a photo or a video is "true" is the same as telling if the written text is "true". You can not tell it by analyzing characters / words in a text, or pixels in a video.

You should analyze the subject who is providing that text / video and decide for yourself, whether you trust that subject or not.

E.g. "Elon Musk is 10 feet tall" - are you reading it on an anonymous X account or on a Business Insider social account? An attached photo of Elon Musk being 10 feet tall does not make a difference.

> I can see Apple going that way eventually.

I can’t.

Historically Apple is a late adopter of the mainstream. And they implement it as default, with little to no customization options.

Not to mention that iPhone cameras already perform heavy photo post-processing.

pretty sure even Xiaomi can do it, just disable stupid AI Camera and/or Super Moon, one of the first things I disable in camera on all Xiaomi phones (wife and me both have Xiaomi 13t and 13 respectively), don't forget also to disable Beautify (switch to Original) for selfie camera and don't remember what is the default selfie mirroring setting, this is very common issue with all brands they are not displaying real sides in selfie photos (real right hand becomes in photo left hand)

It’s a legit possibility that “FaceTime” in the future will be super low bandwidth because the phones on each end do local animations of a deepfaked/skinned model to match live capture rather than transmit high resolution video.

This is actually how FaceTime works on the Apple Vision Pro. Though that’s because your face is covered by a giant headset.

We can already compress video massively, enough to video call on crappy mobile connections without much care. I can’t imagine network connections would get worse in the future so it wouldn’t seem like there would be a need to compress further.

NASAs Deep Space Network? Making calls from space mean you don’t have the bandwidth (tho latency also killer)

I am wondering if the AI enhancement should be opt-in rather than the default and saving the original as well. Even if you want AI enhancement, future models are likely to be better.

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