The article says that “The final composite image should be the best, most realistic interpretation of that moment.” But that doesn’t make any sense. If the there were three real people, rather than one person and two reflections, the algorithm would have created an image of a moment that never existed, stitching together different images taken at different times. The only difference is that we might not notice and mistake the fake image for what we expect from a old-fashioned photograph. I find what Apple is doing repulsive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
How is what it is attempting to do any different from when someone takes multiple pictures of a group shot, and then uses the different shots to ensure no blinks and "best" expression from each subject?
There's a reason professional photogs use the mulitiple snaps mode for non-sports. It used to be a lot of work in post, but a lot of apps have made that easier to now it's a built in feature of our phones.
The difference is in what some photographers call “editorial integrity”. There’s nothing wrong with any kind of image manipulation, as long as it’s done knowingly and deliberately, and as long as the nature of the manipulation is known to the audience. But the typical iphone consumer is just taking snaps and sharing them around, and almost no one knows what’s really happening. It’s creepy and unethical.
And what do you even propose? A mandatory “picture might not represent reality” watermark? Because the way I see it, you either take the computational features away from people, and prevent them from taking an entire class of pictures, or you add a big fat warning somewhere that no one will read anyway, or you keep things the way they are. Which one of these is the ethical choice?
I’m not proposing anything mandatory. I would like it if the biggest corporation in the world would consider the effects of their technology on society, rather than solely on their profits. That they would at least let ethical considerations potentially influence their design decisions. But that’s not how they got to be the biggest company in the world, so I don’t expect this to happen.
So use a non-mobile device with this feature. Nobody is forcing you to use the camera. You know what the camera does, but then continue to use it, and then complain about it doing exactly what you knew it would do. Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result has a name
I think the issue is that people don't know what the camera does. The woman who tried to take a picture of herself in her wedding dress had no idea she'd end up looking like three different people.
I expect that as more and more people come to learn that their iphone photos are all fakes we will see more people reaching for cameras instead of cell phones for the important things when they can.
I think like most things on HN, people are confusing the people here are a much smaller percentage of the population and the majority of the world does not think like HN. Most people don't care one little bit about what the camera does. They only care that it shows them a picture that looks like what they saw. Does it hold up to further scrutiny? Maybe not, but these are also not the people that will be scrutinizing it. Unless they take a picture of their cat and it ends up with the head of a dog, the "your moms" of the world are not going to care.
Maybe, but how many "your moms" would even actually notice this on their own?
As far as computational imaging goes, I've seen way way way worse and much more offensive. Samsung's total replacement of the moon comes to mind as being much more offensive. This one just makes me laugh as a developer at the realization of what happened as being such a strange edge case. Other than that, I've seen similar results from intentional creative ideas, so it's not offensive at all to me.
It's just another example of we can not believe anything we hear, and only half (maybe less) of what we see.
Lemme try: I expect that as more and more people come to learn that their iphone's auto mode is better than their DSLR's auto mode, we will see more people reaching for cell phones instead of cameras for the important things when they can.
A photograph is always an interpretation. A photograph from, say, a modern $2000 big boy camera:
Does not capture the color of every pixel, and merely infers it from the surrounding ones. Is usually viewed on a sRGB screen with shitty contrast and a dynamic range significantly smaller than the one of the camera, which is significantly smaller than the one of human eyes, which is still significantly smaller than what we encounter in the real world. Does not capture a particular moment in time, but a variable length period that’s also shifted between the top part of the image and the bottom part (a couple of ms for mechanical shutter, tens or hundreds of ms for electronic). Has no idea about the white balance of the scene. Has no idea about the absolute brightness of the scene. Usually has significant perspective distortion. Usually has most of the scene out-of focus and thus misrepresents reality (buildings aren’t built and people aren’t born out of focus).
Yep, of course, the colors, the sensor or the film chemicals that react to the frequencies of those photons, the angles of those photons through the lenses, all adapted to our range of view and color perception could be considered even are in the limit of the physics within natural perception, what also could be being crossed when the parameters and mechanics takes certain values, and from MHO its more or less acceptable, our naked eyes can discern how are being evaluated those parameters and mechanics.
Nevertheless, what we are seeing with the post-process of the cameras described in the OP cross the threshold of what until this moment in the history is considered natural "photograph" that can be obtained analogically. Those are manipulated images, undetectable for the naked eye, that are incorporating elements, those are a "composition" that can not be obtained analogically. those images are fakes, lies.
and by the read in the comments it seems the user can not even disable such composed interpretation.
It's impossible to enforce, but it'd be a more honest if people called them something else. iPictures maybe? As in "Hey, check out this iPicture™ of my kid taking his first steps!"
