A U.K. woman was photographed standing in a mirror where her reflections didn’t match, but not because of a glitch in the Matrix. Instead, it’s a simple iPhone computational photography mistake.
This story may be amusing, but it’s actually a serious issue if Apple is doing this and people are not aware of it because cellphone imagery is used in things like court cases. Relative positions of people in a scene really fucking matter in those kinds of situations. Someone’s photo of a crime could be dismissed or discredited using this exact news story as an example – or worse, someone could be wrongly convicted because the composite produced a misleading representation of the scene.
I see your point, though I wouldn’t put it that far. It’s an edge case that has to happen in a very short duration.
Similar effects can be acheived with traditional cameras with rolling shutter.
If you’re only concerned of relative positions of different people during a time frame, I don’t think you need to be that worried. Being aware of it is enough.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think Apple is “filming” over the course of the seconds you have the camera open, and uses the press of the shutter button to select a specific shit from the hundreds of frames that have been taken as video. Then, some algorithm appears to be assembling different portions of those shots into one “best” shot.
It’s not just a mechanical shutter effect.
I’m aware of the differences. I’m just pointing out that similar phenomenon and discussions have been made since rolling shutter artifacts have been a thing. It still only takes milliseconds for an iPhone to finish taking it’s plethora of photos to composite. For the majority of forensic use cases, it’s a non issue imo. People don’t move that quick to change relative positions substantially irl.
I’m still waiting for the first time somebody uses it to zoom in on a car number plate and it helpfully fills it in with some AI bullshit with something else entirely.
We’ve already seen such a thing with image compression.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/xerox-scanners-alter-numbers-in-scanned-documents/
This was important in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. The zoom resolution was interpolated by software. It wasn’t AI per se, but the fact that a jury couldn’t be relied upon to understand a black box algorithm and its possible artifacts, the zoomed video was disallowed.
(this in no way implies that I agree with the court.)
The zoom resolution was interpolated by software. It wasn’t AI per se
Except it was. All the “AI” junk being hyped and peddled all over the place as a completely new and modern innovation is really just the same old interpolation by software, albeit software which is fueled by bigger databases and with more computing power thrown at it.
It’s all just flashier autocorrect.
I watched that whole court exchange live, and it helped the defendant’s case that the judge was computer illiterate.
Saved you a click
Not even a mistake, this is unavoidable if you move during a panorama. iPhones can’t pause time. Cool photo tho
Uhm, ok?
The way the girl’s post is written, it’s like she found out Apple made camera lenses from orphans’ retinas (“almost made me vomit on the street”). I assumed it was well known that iPhone takes many photos and stitches the pic together (hence the usually great quality). Now the software made a mistake, resulting in a definitely cool/interesting pic, but that’s it.
Also, maybe stop flailing your arms around when you want your pic taken in your wedding dress.
Who wants photos of a fake reality? Might as well just AI generate them.
Generally the final photo is an accurate representation of a moment. Everything in this photo happened. It’s not really generating anything that wasn’t there. You can sometimes get similar results by exploiting the rolling shutter effect.
https://camerareviews.com/rolling-shutter/
It’s not like they’re superimposing an image of the moon over a night sky photo to fake astrophotography or something.
A photo is a fake reality. It’s a capture of the world from the perspective of a camera that no person has ever seen.
Sure we can approximate with viewfinders and colour match as much as possible but it’s not reality. Take a photo of a light bulb, versus look at a light bulb, as one obvious example.
This is just one other way to get less consistency in the time of different parts of the photos, but overall better capture what we want to see in a photo.
Your argument makes literally no sense. You’re, baselessly, assuming a person’s perspective is a prism of reality. There’s no such a thing - in fact, I’d rather trust reality as being detected by the sensors of a camera, with their known flaws, attributes and parameters, than trust the biological sensors at the back of your eyes or the biological wiring to the inside of your skull.
Case point: https://youtu.be/UtKt8YF7dgQ?si=G-ni_azX0PYtfUBg And other selective attention demonstrations. People are unreliable and easily manipulated.
Yes, but that’s the reality from the perspective of the camera, which will be slightly different from a perspective of the person operating it.
If the camera is out of focus, is that more or less accurate than a phone camera choosing the least out of focus frame, even if half a second after you clicked?
There is no objective reality in pictures or photos or art, only what we perceive. We now value real life activity shots. When cameras needed long exposure, it was still life portrait by necessity. Both show different versions of reality.
Again, you’re saying that the camera has flaws, ergo it’s imperfect, but in a known way. It’s the same for phone photos. They are imperfect but in a known way that leads to more frequent desirable pics.
However I think most cameras and most people traditionally have wanted the most accurate photos possible. If the camera is outputting fiction that can be a big problem.
To their credit, it’s not “fake”. This isn’t from generative AI, this is from AI picking from multiple different exposures of the same shot and stitching various parts of them together to create the “best” version of the photo.
Everything seen in the photo was still 100% captured in-lens. Just… not at the exact same time.
It’s not the case as someone already explained, but also, who care about the photo being fake ? People take photos to show to other people and keep a memory, and that photo looking better than reality is usually not an issue. I would still prefer choice with a toggle somewhere, which we will never get with an Apple product.
Seriously? She almost vomited because the photos didn’t match? Give me a fucking break!
You think that’s absurd? Have you never gotten married? Wedding photos are extremely important and while “she almost vomited” may be hyperbole, I can definitely understand being very pissed off if that was the only version of the photo. Our wedding photographer whitened our teeth in our photos and we requested that they undo that so we look like ourselves. The sentiment was nice, but we didn’t want that. I would have been pretty unhappy if they hadn’t held onto the originals and were unable to revert our teeth back to their normal shades. Photos of our bridal showers and dress hunting were nearly as important as the wedding photos themselves. I can understand being upset with this undesired result.
