A judge in Washington state has blocked video evidence that’s been “AI-enhanced” from being submitted in a triple murder trial. And that’s a good thing, given the fact that too many people seem to think applying an AI filter can give them access to secret visual data.
No computer algorithm can accurately reconstruct data that was never there in the first place.
Ever.
This is an ironclad law, just like the speed of light and the acceleration of gravity. No new technology, no clever tricks, no buzzwords, no software will ever be able to do this.
Ever.
If the data was not there, anything created to fill it in is by its very nature not actually reality. This includes digital zoom, pixel interpolation, movement interpolation, and AI upscaling. It preemptively also includes any other future technology that aims to try the same thing, regardless of what it’s called.
One little correction, digital zoom is not something that belongs on that list. It’s essentially just cropping the image. That said, “enhanced” digital zoom I agree should be on that list.
Are you saying CSI lied to me?
Even CSI: Miami?
Hold up. Digital zoom is, in all the cases I’m currently aware of, just cropping the available data. That’s not reconstruction, it’s just losing data.
Otherwise, yep, I’m with you there.
See this follow up:
https://lemmy.world/comment/9061929
Digital zoom makes the image bigger but without adding any detail (because it can’t). People somehow still think this will allow you to see small details that were not captured in the original image.
Also since companies are adding AI to everything, sometimes when you think you’re just doing a digital zoom you’re actually getting AI upscaling.
There was a court case not long ago where the prosecution wasn’t allowed to pinch-to-zoom evidence photos on an iPad for the jury, because the zoom algorithm creates new information that wasn’t there.
Digital zoom is just cropping and enlarging. You’re not actually changing any of the data. There may be enhancement applied to the enlarged image afterwards but that’s a separate process.
But the fact remains that digital zoom cannot create details that were invisible in the first place due to the distance from the camera to the subject. Modern implementations of digital zoom always use some manner of interpolation algorithm, even if it’s just a simple linear blur from one pixel to the next.
The problem is not in how a digital zoom works, it’s on how people think it works but doesn’t. A lot of people (i.e. [l]users, ordinary non-technical people) still labor under the impression that digital zoom somehow makes the picture “closer” to the subject and can enlarge or reveal details that were not detectable in the original photo, which is a notion we need to excise from people’s heads.
No it doesn’t. For example you can, with compute power, for distortions introduced by camera lenses/sensors/etc and drastically increase image quality. For example this photo of pluto was taken from 7,800 miles away - click the link for a version of the image that hasn’t been resized/compressed by lemmy:
The unprocessed image would look nothing at all like that. There’s a lot more data in an image than you can see with the naked eye, and algorithms can extract/highlight the data. That’s obviously not what a generative ai algorithm does, those should never be used, but there are other algorithms which are appropriate.
The reality is every modern photo is heavily processed - look at this example by a wedding photographer, even with a professional camera and excellent lighting the raw image on the left (where all the camera processing features are disabled) looks like garbage compared to exactly the same photo with software processing:
None of your examples are creating new legitimate data from the whole cloth. They’re just making details that were already there visible to the naked eye. We’re not talking about taking a giant image that’s got too many pixels to fit on your display device in one go, and just focusing on a specific portion of it. That’s not the same thing as attempting to interpolate missing image data. In that case the data was there to begin with, it just wasn’t visible due to limitations of the display or the viewer’s retinas.
The original grid of pixels is all of the meaningful data that will ever be extracted from any image (or video, for that matter).
Your wedding photographer’s picture actually throws away color data in the interest of contrast and to make it more appealing to the viewer. When you fiddle with the color channels like that and see all those troughs in the histogram that make it look like a comb? Yeah, all those gaps and spikes are actually original color/contrast data that is being lost. There is less data in the touched up image than the original, technically, and if you are perverse and own a high bit depth display device (I do! I am typing this on a machine with a true 32-bit-per-pixel professional graphics workstation monitor.) you actually can state at it and see the entirety of the detail captured in the raw image before the touchups. A viewer might not think it looks great, but how it looks is irrelevant from the standpoint of data capture.
They talked about algorithms used for correcting lens distortions with their first example. That is absolutely a valid use case and extracts new data by making certain assumptions with certain probabilities. Your newly created law of nature is just your own imagination and is not the prevalent understanding in the scientific community. No, quite the opposite, scientific practice runs exactly counter your statements.
In my first year of university, we had a fun project to make us get used to physics. One of the projects required filming someone throwing a ball upwards, and then using the footage to get the maximum height the ball reached, and doing some simple calculations to get the initial velocity of the ball (if I recall correctly).
One of the groups that chose that project was having a discussion on a problem they were facing: the ball was clearly moving upwards on one frame, but on the very next frame it was already moving downwards. You couldn’t get the exact apex from any specific frame.
So one of the guys, bless his heart, gave a suggestion: “what if we played the (already filmed) video in slow motion… And then we filmed the video… And we put that one in slow motion as well? Maybe do that a couple of times?”
A friend of mine was in that group and he still makes fun of that moment, to this day, over 10 years later. We were studying applied physics.
Okay, but what if we’ve got a computer program that can just kinda insert red eyes, joints, and plums of chum smoke on all our suspects?
That’s wrong. With a degree of certainty, you will always be able to say that this data was likely there. And because existence is all about probabilities, you can expect specific interpolations to be an accurate reconstruction of the data. We do it all the time with resolution upscaling, for example. But of course, from a certain lack of information onward, the predictions become less and less reliable.
By your argument, nothing is ever real, so let’s all jump on a chasm.
There’s a grain of truth to that. Everything you see is filtered by the limitations of your eyes and the post-processing applied by your brain which you can’t turn off. That’s why you don’t see the blind spot on your retinas where your optic nerve joins your eyeball, for instance.
You can argue what objective reality is from within the limitations of human observation in the philosophy department, which is down the hall and to your left. That’s not what we’re talking about, here.
From a computer science standpoint you can absolutely mathematically prove the amount of data that is captured in an image and, like I said, no matter how hard you try you cannot add any more data to it that can be actually guaranteed or proven to reflect reality by blowing it up, interpolating it, or attempting to fill in patterns you (or your computer) think are there. That’s because you cannot prove, no matter how the question or its alleged solution are rephrased, that any details your algorithm adds are actually there in the real world except by taking a higher resolution/closer/better/wider spectrum image of the subject in question to compare. And at that point it’s rendered moot anyway, because you just took a higher res/closer/better/wider/etc. picture that contains the required detail, and the original (and its interpolation) are unnecessary.
You cannot technically prove it, that’s true, but that does not invalidate the interpolated or extrapolated data, because you will be able to have a certain degree of confidence in them, be able to judge their meaningfulness with a specific probability. And that’s enough, because you are never able to 100% prove something in physical sciences. Never. Even our most reliable observations, strongest theories and most accurate measurements all have a degree of uncertainty. Even the information and quantum theories you rest your argument on are unproven and unprovable by your standards, because you cannot get to 100% confidence. So, if you find that there’s enough evidence for the science you base your understanding of reality on, then rationally and by deductive reasoning you will have to accept that the prediction of a machine learning model that extrapolates some data where the probability of validity is just as great as it is for quantum physics must be equally true.