Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “All Photos are Fake Now”.
That actually transitions us pretty well into another topic here. Samsung has been under Fire this week for effectively um. Well, there’s there’s some Nuance here: okay, let’s, let’s read through our notes and then we’ll discuss. Most modern phones use a fair degree of post-processing to improve the output of their cameras, we’re talking everything from Edge detection and sharpening this one motion blur reduction to removing red eye, etc, etc. The AI or machine learning processing on Samsung’s recent gen phone cameras, however, seems to be going quite a bit further. Starting with the s20 Ultra Samsung introduced a 100x space Zoom feature, which typically shows up in Samsung’s ads with the suggestion that you will be able to use your phone camera to take a high definition picture of the moon, Reddit user break.
I break photos tested this downsizing and purposefully blurring an image of the Moon, then, with their phone taking a picture of the image from across the dark room with a Samsung Galaxy, the phone added significantly more details than ever existed in the original image, including clear craggy. Moon craters. They then tried another experiment taking a photo of an image of a blurry Moon and that same Moon cut in half the blurry. Full moon came out as a clear High detailed photo while the half moon remained blurry. So here’s a gif of the Moon photo being taken and then processed wait for it.
Are we gon na take the picture at some point here: okay, huh! So it’s just adding stuff that wasn’t there. This seems to indicate that it is using machine learning, features to blend the output image, with details from an algorithm that was trained on photo high resolution photos of the Moon. So the conversation we’re having here is is Samsung, misrepresenting the capability of their phone or is Samsung simply building a smart feature into their device that works as effectively as if their their telephoto Zoom actually did manage to take a clear picture of the moon. Where are you at on this? In my opinion, as long as it’s communicated as a feature, it’s fine, especially given that there is no other near space astral object that you can actually take a picture of with 100x zoom anyway. So if they, if they train this thing with the moon, then is that any different from if they train it using pictures of people and you take pictures of people from far away and they are also clearer or like famous landmarks or whatever like.
If you take a picture of the the pyramids now, where we run into trouble is, and he gaps in their training model are going to appear markedly worse than things that they have actually trained it on um. You know, I think, I think, that this okay, our discussion question, is: is this image processing or is this AI image generation with a price? I think it’s, I think it’s both okay, which I think is fine and fair. Okay, by the way, I think this sagged, because I noticed you’re slouching a lot and you know I’d hate for your mother to be upset with me for allowing you to slouch just our heads started at the same height at the beginning of the show and you’ve Been I’m very tired today that might be part of it, but I’ll be fine, um yeah, but I think it’s both.
I think it’s both yeah. I just think it’s funny is what I think it is more than anything yeah. I think it’s weird. I think if it’s something that you can turn off and it’s advertised as a feature like who cares personally right, I don’t know, I was very surprised that people were so up in arms about this.
Really. Personally, I can see that because if I well the fact that it was featured prominently in their marketing, though without any further well, I never saw their marketing yeah. So that’s what’s upsetting to people is: that’s totally fair, they’re marketing this as space Zoom, which technically is correct anything you could reasonably take a picture of in space from Earth. It works with. So it’s like okay, but it’s obvious that the implication is that, with 100x space Zoom, you could take pictures on Earth at 100 times magnification when in practice, a lot of that is digital and then post-processing, and that post-processing is only as good as whatever data data Set is trained on yeah people in chat are saying it’s about how they Market it.
They sell it as the zoom being so good. You could take a clear picture of the Moon. That’S totally fair. That’S BS like I was saying, though, if they advertise it as a feature and it’s something, especially if it’s something that you can turn off in the software, then that’s like that’s just neat to me. I don’t know because if it can, if it takes like color input from your photo – and it takes all this other different types of things yeah, but then it takes things that it knows about the moon and just enhances the image a little bit.
That’S even just cool like I would. I would want it to be able to do that. That’S sweet, it might have been better if they just messaged it correctly, and we wouldn’t have this controversy.
100. It’S so frustrating when engineers build cool stuff, yes and then marketing. Just it’s this other thing now: yeah just drops a giant boner on everything, thanks a lot marketing department, speaking of uh giant boner, do you want to talk about this uh, not yet? Okay, yeah! I know I I screwed up last week. Well, okay, I screwed up a few things last week, one enough out of you and you .