I can't find it now, but there was a prototype someone made in the 2000s of a camera that, when you pressed the shutter, would fetch an image on Flickr that most closely matched your GPS coordinates + time of day, acting in a similar way as a "crowdsourced camera with no lens".
Fun to the see a modern reincarnation of that idea.
(While digging around to find the above, I did find yet another camera project that does the opposite: "Matt Richardson's "Descriptive Camera" sends your pictures to Amazon's Mechanical Turk and jobs out the task of writing a brief description of each image, then outputs the text on a thermal printer. It's a camera that captures descriptions, not pictures." (https://boingboing.net/2012/04/25/descriptive-camera-prints-...)
In 2013 a friend and I made a similar photo app (called parallelogram.me) but based on visual similarity instead of GPS coordinates: https://rybakov.com/parallelogram/
At a hilarious intersection of the present concerns about AI, bias, and prejudice (especially as voiced in the current front-page article^1 about a different blind camera project, from 2022), and the state of internet search engines, given the query [blind camera art project], Bing and Google find only articles about visually impaired photographers, but Yandex finds an entire results page of articles about the work we're looking for! What gives?
If anything, this is a neat art piece asking "Why do people take pictures?".
I've found often that the gut feel that makes you take the shot doesn't necessarily know when you have the right composition or what the subject of the shot actually is, you just hit he shutter, you know that this was the shot.
Then, when looking at the shots, you have all the time and the world to analyse and find meaning and beauty in this sliver of an instant.
By replacing this by a random seed, a 20 word prompt and gps localisation, I doubt that anyone would have a personal connection to the image, or to the instant it was taken. It become a "clean", "sanitized" image, that's only esthetic (or arguably memetic depending on your prompt), and is wholly separate from the person that took it.
You also lose all of the information that you can not consciously perceive while taking the shot/writing the prompt, since you filter what you see through the lens of language, and then back into visual.
Fun exercise if you're new to photography is taking photos and cropping them to let's say 1/4th the size. You often get photos giving you a completely new perspective on things you've seen many times.
For example it's easy to make a photo look like it was taken from a non-existing tower if you crop the upper part of a regular photo. Or you can focus on details that you always skip over because there's something more eye-grabbing nearby.
This is also why I love to see photos made by people who visited my city for the first time. They don't know which parts are pretty so they capture stuff I wouldn't think to photograph.
I am a lousy photographer. I never get that "this was the shot" feeling.
I assume I could develop it with practice. I just never did. I rarely had a camera growing up, and now that I have one with me all of the time, I treat it like the Instamatics I used to have. The pictures are terrible.
At best, they're a kind of bookmark that I was at that place and saw that thing. It won't have an emotional resonance for anybody but me, and for me it's just bringing up the much better picture in my head. If they want a good picture of the thing, I'll go find one that somebody else took.
All of which is to say... I really admire good photographers. I respect their work, and the diligence it took to develop their eye.
This is, as you note, an interesting art piece on that same subject. I'm afraid I'm better with words, so this is mine.
I didn't take pictures I was proud of before going to protests to take pictures of people there, and trying to frame them as "badass" as possible.
Now I mostly shoot animals and landscapes, but I've been doing it for years at every oportunity I get, so my "gut feel" is strong there. I'm not great at portraits, for example, and have 0 interest in street shooting.
For what it's worth, maybe try to write down your thoughts on places that matter to you, when they do (kind of like a picture). Or a quick freeform poem
It might output a much more detailed image than a human-drawn sketch which could be less useful or more damaging than the vague sketch.
Imagine that a police officer is looking for someone matching the image but doesn't know that it's hallucinated from a vague description, they could let the real suspect go or incorrectly arrest someone who happens to look like the AI generated image but otherwise doesn't have any reason to be a suspect.
Police are already greatly overestimating the accuracy of their own facial recognition tools because they don't realize the limits of the technology, and this would just be worse.
Accountability for what? I recall Procedure already requires approval of the final sketch by the witness. Witnesses could always make mistakes, but that's true even in the current process. Or is your argument sketches should never be used?
In fairness, with the ubiquity of cameras, sketches are much less required...
Our hypothetical AI won't make any decisions. It just makes sketches as described and approved by witnesses. The relevant racism here is the one any witnesses may have, that's true even with a human police sketch artist.
"as described" according to what? There is simply no way to create image from words without something closely resembling decisions. Maybe "it" won't "make" those decisions, but they will be made somewhere.
Yea, somebody will have to evaluate whether the image matches the word, and that is currently done by the witnesses themselves. How is it worse than the current state?
In the racism-as-individual-intentional-malice framework sure. But I'm a consequentialist on this one. If it causes disparate & unjust outcomes mediated by perceived race then describing it as racist makes sense. No intent necessary.
No one is arguing that the AI has some sort of intentional racism and inherent real intelligence - they aren't trying to anthropomorphize it.
The argument is that the output is racially discriminatory for a variety of reasons and it's easier to just say "it's racist" than "Many of the datasets that AI is trained on under- or over-represent many ethnic groups" and then dive into the details there.
Well, maybe it will be a plus then for minorities that all of the training data is of white people. I only joke, as this is a horrible idea all around, but I appreciate your creativity.
Not an expert, but my intuition is that most of the sketch artists job is asking the right questions. I would assume that most people would have trouble describing close friends or even their partners from memory.
Somewhat tangential: the "part of the brain" that is responsible for recognizing faces is incredibly well developed. That "peek-a-boo" game that you play with children? Every time you uncover your face millions of neurons in the childs brain suddenly fire giving them a jolt of "joy".
The face recognition is so developed that we tend to see faces were there are none (face pareidolia).
... the point being that the brain does a lot of unconscious work recognizing individuals. Describing those individuals later consciously is pretty error prone.
As I understand it most police departments already use some kind of computer aided facial composite software instead of a traditional sketch artist. I can think of several dystopian reasons throwing AI into the mix might not be great, but tbe larger problem with this is why does it need to be sketched in pen and why does it need to be cute.
Might make a neat like coin op charicature thing though.
I doubt it would change anything from what they do currently with police sketches; it would just be a faster, more accurate version. It's still just one piece of data they have to work from. The victim could describe the person to an AI, and it would update the 3D model on the fly.
"White Male, Curly hair, mole on face"
Generate.
"Good, but he had a larger nose, and blue eyes."
Generate.
"He was a bit more gaunt, and had some stubble."
Generate.
"Nearly there. More pronounced check bones, and make the jaw a bit softer"
Generate.
In 5 minutes or less, you could get a near exact picture of the potential criminal; something that might take up to an hour or more normally with a professional police sketch artist, and it could easily be in 3D too. There's tremendous value in that.
So, this is pretty much backwards from how police sketches actually work and it would likely obliterate any reliability from the system (which, as I understand, is very low already - and even worse for computer-generated imagery).
People have bad memories and bad perception in stressful situations. They don't actually know what the person looked like; they don't have a strong model in their brains. Police sketchers use clever questioning techniques to get details about features that people wouldn't otherwise think to describe or even realize they have knowledge about. The truth is that there is an absolute limitation to the effectiveness of any facial image reconstruction, which is the limits of human memory. Adding AI to the mix can't change that, but it's extremely likely to influence the witness to describing a less accurate face with higher confidence. In other words, a disaster.
There is probably some "wisdom in crowds" for identifying a suspect. For example one person usually can't estimate the number of gumballs in a jar, but some studies have shown that if you survey 100 people you get a very accurate number. Maybe you need far less than that.. 2-3 people + AI perhaps comes up with a reasonably accurate estimation of reality.
Sadly, events are far more complex than counting items. For example, during the Columbine shooting, many students thought there were 4 shooters (while there were only 2), because at some point one of them remove their hoodie and the other turned their baseball cap backwards. The police thought there were shooters on the second floor because of an optical illusion.
These types of problems are very widespread - it's not rare that people misremember details because of the stress and trauma, and it's also well known that the process of describing/asking questions can cause bias into the victim, as seen in the many cases of people admitting crimes they didn't commit after long interogations.
I've also heard that the quality of police sketches was highly related to the person making the sketch, some have high correlation rate but that is not the norm i.e.: the average sketch artist might not be reliable on average.
JCS Psychology on Youtube is a great channel showing the processes happening during interrogations, if you're interested.
This is basically the plot of "The Net" starring Sandra Bullock. A group of hackers steals her identity and creates a new one for her in various systems to cause the police to believe she is a wanted felon.
It's intriguing, because I wonder how this would affect police work. I'm imagining things here, but I assume that when a profile sketch is developed, all officers using that image know that it's "just a sketch" because, it looks like a drawing, because it is one.
So what happens if you now generate a photorealistic "sketch" based on a description? Are officers going to be sufficiently aware to know that's not a actual photo of the guy they are looking for, and act accordingly? Or is it going to heavily bias a manhunt effort? moreover, what happens when the photo randomly ends up close to someone present in the dataset?
The police already know those sketches are super fake lol. The point of those isn't to arrest the right person it's to have an excuse to hassle arrest or maybe kill a minority.
I know that would solve the problem. What I'm curious about is what happens if that isn't done, because I can see promoting the idea of a "photorealistic AI sketch artist" as a very attractive proposal for a certain type of manager. It's just a thought experiment.
Cute and fun idea, but it'd be nice if it could take better indoor photos.
Jokes aside, I think this demonstrates that AI generation isn't too great if you have something very specific in mind, at least it looks like the generated picture deviates from the real one, though it's impressive that it's still so extremely similar.
Think its more interesting as an art piece when we take into account the amount of AI and processing phone cameras do that crosses at times into the areas of "just an image generator"
It's a camera in the general sense of "result is a image" but not a camera in the sense of capturing physical properties of our world and convert it into bytes/pixels/analog film.
I guess it's a "camera" as much as 3D software has "cameras" for controlling what the viewport is pointing towards.
> It's a camera in the general sense of "result is a image"
So is the midjourney discord bot a camera? Microsoft paint? Your printer?
You could say its kinda a camera because it takes pictures are your location. But it is in no way seeing anything (obviously, because there is no lense). It's just sliding some preset parameters around based on location.
Again, not that its not impressive, but camera seems like the wrong word for it.
Interesting, but (to me at least) the point of photography will always be the technical process behind it, and capturing a _specific_ aspect of the environment. This will turn out fine generic images, but if you want to capture more, that's not something you can just synthesise.
This isn't really a camera, it's a GPS hooked up to Stable Diffusion.
Unfortunately the major weakness of this camera is the one thing I actually use my camera for: photos of my kids (and other people I know). But for stuff like landmarks, I never even bother taking photos of them—I’ll never take a photo of Delicate Arch that is as good as one million others I can find by doing an image search.
The title is really misleading. I was expecting a camera without lens, using a type of light sensitive array and reconstructing the focused image using AI
“ The star-nosed mole, which lives and hunts underground, finds light useless. Consequently, it has evolved to perceive the world through its finger-like antennae, granting it an unusual and intelligent way of "seeing." This amazing animal became the perfect metaphor and inspiration for how empathizing with other intelligences and the way they perceive the world can be nearly impossible to imagine from a human perspective.”
When Stable Diffusion was released, and I saw the whole model was ~4 GB.. I instantly thought how insane it would be if it somehow was possible to take the model and a compiled binary of the inference code for x86_64 (without any modern extensions) on a DVD back in time, say around 2005-2006ish, and the implications that would have, psychologically, on the world.
You could load that model on a moderate desktop with a 64 bit Core 2 Duo and 8GB of ram and let it chug .. without GPU acceleration, on CPU only it would take ~2 hours to make an image. But it would do it without an internet connection, without any inspectable code or heuristics... just... numbers, spitting out an image from text of whatever_people_want.
It would be called a hoax. (In fact, I came across people on reddit when Dalle2 came out claiming it was somehow a trick or a hoax, and that all the images it produced must be existing beforehand somehow and prerendered).
Scientists who dissected the weights file and the machine code for the inference engine would eventually figure out it was a neural net, but how such a net was trained would be a complete mystery. Theories involving aliens would likely appear.
I wonder if it would be allowed to be made public, just the knowledge that such a thing was working. It would scare people, I think. Having it make these images without anyone knowing how.
Hell, it is kinda scary now, ever knowing how it all works.
Fun to the see a modern reincarnation of that idea.
(While digging around to find the above, I did find yet another camera project that does the opposite: "Matt Richardson's "Descriptive Camera" sends your pictures to Amazon's Mechanical Turk and jobs out the task of writing a brief description of each image, then outputs the text on a thermal printer. It's a camera that captures descriptions, not pictures." (https://boingboing.net/2012/04/25/descriptive-camera-prints-...)