
AIs are now re-writing history - mooreds
http://www.robertelliottsmith.com/?p=530
======
mbca
The middle paragraphs are just further proof that talking to a blowhard like
Cory Doctorow is a complete waste of time. The "all photos are fake at some
level" slippery slope argument is beyond tiresome. The fact that something
like white balance introduces a small amount of post-processing into
photographs does not mean that _all_ levels of photo manipulation are somehow
equal. That's nonsense on its face and should be called out as such. You need
a trampoline and a net to make that kind of jump in logic.

~~~
moogleii
Exactly. If a dog views the same scene as me, and it presumably sees only
black and white, did we see a different reality? No, we saw different colors.

~~~
itp
Off topic, but just so you know -- dogs are colorblind (as compared to us) in
that they have a more limited perception of color, but they don't just see
black and white (and shades of gray)!

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-
corner/200810/can...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-
corner/200810/can-dogs-see-colors)

------
chrisrhoden
"I told him that algorithms are, without prompting from their human designers
or the owners of the photos, creating human moments that never existed."

I'm not sure how anyone could make the argument that this occurred without
prompting from their human designers.

This seems to be a continuation of a theme, where AI academics and theorists
are so divorced from the realities of present-day engineering that they assume
we're much closer to singularity than we are. I spend so much time making
things display in the correct order.

~~~
geekpondering
I don't think its necessarily a question of how close we are to the
singularity. I think it's a question of how close we are to the Orwellian
Memory Hole.

~~~
JetSpiegel
But that was inspired by Stalin's photo manipulations, so it's not a question
of "how close", we effectively already live in that world.

~~~
dllthomas
Stalin's oppression took quite a lot of man-hours.

------
AndrewKemendo
This is really cool! I agree with the author a bit, however I think his
concern stems from the fact that it was largely because he did not know it was
going to happen.

I also think that Doctorow's dismissal of his concerns as "trivial on the
scale" is silly and somewhat arrogant. Automated alteration of a picture to
the point of making a new picture non-discernible from an original is a real
different thing. In this case it was very subtle, but the application of this
could really have some broad impacts. I recall for example the doctored photo
from Iranian missile launches [1] or the Egyptian PM red carpet photoshop [2].

Yes this has been going on forever, but automating it makes the impacts really
scale quickly.

[1][http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/in-an-iranian-
im...](http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/in-an-iranian-image-a-
missile-too-many/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0)

[2][http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/16/mubarak-
doctore...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/16/mubarak-doctored-red-
carpet-picture)

~~~
freehunter
How do you not know it will happen? I haven't used AutoAwesome since just
after it was released, but at least back then it was an opt-in. Google didn't
just automatically overwrite your pictures, you selected which ones you wanted
to make AutoAwesome.

Has that changed?

~~~
wrs
According to the Google help page referenced in the article, it is on by
default, but you are notified when it happens. Pictures aren't overwritten;
new ones are added.

------
mooreds
The title is a bit hyped, but the examination of implications of algorithms is
interesting.

------
whitten
I appreciate the artistic license of saying the "AIs" are doing this, but this
isn't an AI issue at all. This is a particular single purpose program "Smile!"
which is producing results by combining pictures together to produce a picture
the author never took with a camera.

He could have blamed Snidely Whiplash, or the greek god Zeus with just as much
verity.

~~~
yk
To generate this effect a program has to identify, that the photos are almost
identical, that there are smiling people in them and then find a way to stitch
the two photos together. I think that qualifies as AI.

~~~
shakethemonkey
It's AI in the sense that a pocket calculator from 1980 is AI. It doesn't know
what it's doing, can only perform a limited range of calculations under tight
constraints, has no awareness of whether or not the result is meaningful, and
unless the authors went seriously overboard developing the suite, cannot learn
from what it has done to improve the process.

~~~
yk
Well, I am afraid that we are discussing semantics. The functions performed by
the software, like facial recognition, are classical AI problems. Granted the
software is certainly not any kind of general intelligence, and probably not
even cutting edge AI, but it does still perform pattern recognition in
unstructured data etc.

~~~
yen223
Ironically, parsing semantics is also a classic AI problem.

------
Zigurd
This an interesting example, but other photo processing techniques can really
make the "commissar vanish" and jack up the creepy factor. The same photo
software vendors that make your smartphone jpgs look uncannily good can remove
moving objects from your vacation snaps. The person being chased by a cop
across your Eiffel Tower snap will just vanish without a trace.

The shutter button is just a hint. The camera knows what you want to see
before you do.

------
lazyjones
Doesn't this simply illustrate that as science advances, education of the
general population must keep up to raise awareness of what's possible?

We've failed to educate people about many risks associated with the use of
computers, but "photoshopped" images are a well-known phenomenon (though doing
this to the extent described in the article, without anyone being aware of it,
is a bit of a novelty).

------
bitJericho
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records
told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. -
George Orwell

------
ivanche
Some time ago I conducted a simple (albeit impossible in practice, for now at
least) thought experiment. Let's say that average size of a JPEG image is 5
MB. Now, some machine could generate all possible valid JPEG files sized 5 MB.
In some of those images there would be events which never happen, and never
could (for example Usain Bolt running in 1896 Athens Olympic Games etc.) Of
course, sheer number of such images is ginormous, but for me it's interesting
(and scary) that something like this will maybe be possible...

~~~
masklinn
I'm not sure you realise the scales involved. 5MB (40Mb) is enough to create
1e12626113 different files, that's a number with 12.5 million digits

For reference, the number of atoms in the visible universe is ~1e80 (1e78 to
1e82), you'd generate 1e12626033 images per atom (doesn't look any different
does it? Well it's got 80 zeroes chopped off). For a second reference,
assuming you're a standard-size hooman you have 1e14 cells tops (estimate
vary, "An estimation of the number of cells in the human body"[0] gave
3.7e13).

So no, it's not possible. Even if you remove a few order of magnitudes to
account for invalid jpegs, let's say we cut it by a thousand _orders of
magnitude_ it's still 1e12000 images to generate[1].

They're also all contained in PI. And the thought experiment is but a variant
of the infinite monkeys theorem[2]

[0]
[http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/03014460.2013.8...](http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/03014460.2013.807878)

[1] if you can compute full tilt until the heath death of the universe you
have ~1e47 seconds, you'd need to compute 1e11953 images per second… or
1e11873 images per second per atom in the universe

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem)

~~~
ccvannorman
:-]

I thought of a similar thing for an mp3; a computer would produce every
possible "song"..but even at an incredibly low resolution of 100 kilobytes for
a 3 minute song, you're looking at 2^800,000 possibilities. (1e240000).

Another cool one is possible games of Go, ~1e768. This is one reason top
computers still can't touch top humans at winning the game.

Big numbers are fun. :-]

~~~
dTal
I don't think the number of possible games has anything to do with the
difficulty of programming computers to play Go. There are 10^120 possible
games of chess, for instance - still 40 orders of magnitude larger than the
number of protons in the observable universe - and yet computers roundly
defeat humans at chess these days.

