this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
960 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
3501 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This actually opens an interesting debate.
Every photo you take with your phone is post processed. Saturation can be boosted, light levels adjusted, noise removed, night mode, all without you being privy as to what's happening.
Typically people are okay with it because it makes for a better photo - but is it a true representation of the reality it tried to capture? Where is the line of the definition of an ai-enhanced photo/video?
We can currently make the judgement call that a phones camera is still a fair representation of the truth, but what about when the 4k AI-Powered Night Sight Camera does the same?
My post is more tangentially related to original article, but I'm still curious as what the common consensus is.
Years ago, I remember looking at satellite photos of some city, and there was a rainbow colored airplane trail on one of the photos. It was explained that for a lot of satellites, they just use a black and white imaging sensor, and take 3 photos while rotating a red/green/blue filter over that sensor, then combining the images digitally into RGB data for a color image. For most things, the process worked pretty seamlessly. But for rapidly moving objects, like white airplanes, the delay between the capture of red/green/blue channel created artifacts in the image that weren't present in the actual truth of the reality being recorded. Is that specific satellite method all that different from how modern camera sensors process color, through tiny physical RGB filters over specific subpixels?
Even with conventional photography, even analog film, there's image artifacts that derive from how the photo is taken, rather than what is true of the subject of the photograph. Bokeh/depth of field, motion blur, rolling shutter, and physical filters change the resulting image in a way that is caused by the camera, not the appearance of the subject. Sometimes it makes for interesting artistic effects. But it isn't truth in itself, but rather evidence of some truth, that needs to be filtered through an understanding of how the image was captured.
Like the Mitch Hedberg joke:
So yeah, at a certain point, for evidentiary proof in court, someone will need to prove some kind of chain of custody that the image being shown in court is derived from some reliable and truthful method of capturing what actually happened in a particular time and place. For the most part, it's simple today: i took a picture with a normal camera, and I can testify that it came out of the camera like this, without any further editing. As the chain of image creation starts to include more processing between photons on the sensor and digital file being displayed on a screen or printed onto paper, we'll need to remain mindful of the areas where that can be tripped up.
Fantasitc expansion of my thought. This is something that isn't going to be answered with an exact scientific value but will have to decided based on our human experiences with the tech. Interesting times ahead.