Mastodawn

Dan Wright Mar 12, 2023

Interesting thread concluding that Samsung is using an AI model to replace users’ blurry, super-zoomed photos of the Moon with slightly higher res textures.

How did they discover this?

1. They downloaded a high res image of the Moon
2. Downscaled it to a blurry 170x170px image on their computer monitor
3. Took a photo of it on the Samsung with the room lights out

…and they got a magically higher-res Moon! Clever.

https://reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/

Samsung "space zoom" moon shots are fake, and here is the proof

**This post has been updated with several additional experiments in newer posts, which address most comments and clarify what exactly is going...

reddit

Adrian Hon Mar 11, 2023

AI image enhancement and upscaling isn’t new or exclusive to Samsung, of course. Take a blurry image of some grass and an algorithm can fill in the gaps based on what it thinks “grass” looks like.

People usually don’t notice or care; with the Moon it’s weird (and weirdly effective) because it looks the same for everyone, and everyone knows what it looks like.

Adrian Hon Mar 11, 2023

Is it bad? I’d need to think more about it!

Smartphone photography is already incredibly processed, lightyears from film photography of old. People should probably be more aware that the image their phone shows them is increasingly distant from “reality” – though most of the time, people don’t want reality!

Adrian Hon Mar 11, 2023

I was trying to think of a good sci-fi short story idea around this.

Turns out I already wrote it in my book, A New History of the Future in 100 Objects, three years ago! I've just put it on my blog for free.

https://mssv.net/2023/03/11/enhance/

Enhance

mssv

nekojet Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon Here you go. You take a blurry picture of a crime in progress. The camera software's AI "enhances" the image, including the once-blurry face of the possible criminal. You report the crime to the police and submit your picture as possible evidence. (You can see where this is going.) The wrong person is arrested...and so on. Here's a twist for the story...the AI enhancement of the possible criminal makes it look *just like you*! Oh no! 🤓

Peter Hanecak Mar 12, 2023

@adrianhon Not a short, but still #SciFi about man with replaced eyes (and other stuff):

Man Plus
by Frederik Pohl
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus

It of course goes way further than "doctoring" photos in smart-phone:

"At every step he becomes more and more disconnected from humanity, unable to feel things in his new body."

Man Plus - Wikipedia

Dave Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon A “camera” app that doesn’t use your camera, it just creates an image based on your location, time & angle analyzing every online geolocated photo. I bet it could do well at oft-traveled landmarks.

Adrian Hon Mar 11, 2023

@_ Gonna happen!

Julia Rez Mar 11, 2023

A friend and I started work on a phone app named 'InStowGram' - whatever picture you tried to take would be replaced by a scenic view of Stow on the Wold in Gloucestershire.

However we all quickly discovered I couldn't code android apps worth a light.

Natanael ⚠️Mar 11, 2023

@_ @adrianhon essentially an in-game photo mode except with street view synchronized to your location.

Google maps live view already have 90% of the tech to map your GPS and camera data to street view and map data to accurately overlay visual navigation cues (arrows) over the camera view. They could go all the way with AI repainting of the full camera view.

Sören Mar 12, 2023

@Natanael_L @_ @adrianhon sort of a modern take on Photosynth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth

Photosynth - Wikipedia

David Mankins Mar 13, 2023

@_ @adrianhon
Your selfie, just you and the Mona Lisa, hangin’ out in the Louvre, no mob of tourists

ricardo vacapinta Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon What if my Art consists of pixelated moons? Will cameras never capture it? I also can't help but think of a scifi story where some alien artifacts appear on the Moon and you can guess how the rest goes...

Adrian Hon Mar 11, 2023

@vacapinta I’m juggling a few short story ideas in my head right now, it’s fertile ground!

Crecente 🦣Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon on some level it’s like how most consumer headphones are “tuned”. You’re not actually hearing the music the same way the artist and engineers wanted you to.

Martijn van Dijk Mar 11, 2023

@Crecenteb @adrianhon yes and no. Those headphones still stay true to the input of the original recording to some extent. They just emphasise certain parts of the recording. It’s not like those headphones will inject new sounds that are not there in the original.

Personally I don’t like that approach to headphones, but to each their own.

Oblomov Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon There seems to be at least an issue of false advertising.

J. Nathan Matias 🦣Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon I wonder if upscaling will affect what kind of phone evidence is admissible in court

Adrian Hon Mar 11, 2023

@natematias I was thinking about this!

J. Nathan Matias 🦣Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon Sam Gregory at WITNESS has done work on deepfakes, so, and evidence. I bet he would have a helpful perspective.

Dave Vogt Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon realized this, but now i wonder, how many consumer devices even give the owner actual sensor data

Natanael ⚠️Mar 11, 2023

@hiimmrdave @adrianhon raw mode is available in a lot of smartphone cameras

Tobias Due Munk Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon recently when taking pictures with the moon in the frame I’ve been increasingly annoyed that the photos completely wash out the moon and don’t capture what I see. I thought of something like this to solve it and would love for it to improve my photos.

The puritanical approach where only photos captured “in camera” are good enough/correct completely ignores the fact that I just want a representation of what I saw saved for posterity.

Art vs snapshot.

Damon L. Wakes Mar 12, 2023

@tobiasdm @adrianhon This is getting a step away from the moon thing, but I've run into problems trying to edit visual effects into videos because my phone camera adjusts brightness (or something similar) mid-video, making it difficult to blend two sections of the same video seamlessly. I can't seem to find an app/setting that won't automatically try to make things "better," which is a nuisance even though I probably benefit from it under normal circumstances.

Daniel Tucker Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon this is such an interesting point. I wonder how far off you need to be from the original subject for it to not work.

Kevin Mar 12, 2023

@adrianhon I noticed this when I was digitizing a physical magazine I bought. The page had a photo of a person on it and the phone camera significantly smoothed the image. You could zoom way in and never see the CMYK dots of the (2006) magazine. A consumer-grade scanner reproduced the dots.

danimrich Mar 12, 2023

@adrianhon I think it's bad for the simple reason that people will often take a picture of the moon to gauge the camera's performance. This isn't a picture of a child blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, where an intelligent camera would make sure that the focus and exposure are well chosen in order to capture the fleeting moment well. The moon looks the same every month, as you said.
This is Samsung cheating so that people get a better impression of their camera.

Kel Stewart Mar 12, 2023

@adrianhon I think it’s bad not only because I’m an iPhone user but also because the marketing makes no mention of this. I think it should at least be called out that you may not actually be capturing an image rather you’re capturing a reference target for an AI image processor to draw you a picture of the moon which is very different from you taking a picture of the moon and thinking your camera is good enough to create that image without AI assistance.

little bobby tables Mar 12, 2023

@adrianhon it's probably no problem in case of the moon. but what if it happens with photographs of text and numbers? we'd have another Xerox/jbig2 apocalypse as found by David Kriesel years ago.

Winchell Chung ⚛🚀Mar 15, 2023

@adrianhon
Question: will this mean that smartphone photos will no longer be admissible as evidence in a court if law?

Clayfoot Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon oh yeah, that guy

John Manoogian III Mar 11, 2023

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/
Moon landing is real but Samsung moon photos are fake

Samsung "space zoom" moon shots are fake, and here is the proof

**This post has been updated with several additional experiments in newer posts, which address most comments and clarify what exactly is going...

reddit

Waldo Jaquith Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon Presumably this would fail in the southern hemisphere. In e.g. Botswana, presumably a photographer would be puzzled to see their photo of the moon was upside-down.

Adrian Hon Mar 11, 2023

@waldoj It would work because good AI models are rotation-independent!

Waldo Jaquith Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon I hope someone from the southern half of Earth demos that!

Elio Campitelli Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon It would be nice if this were disclosed. For example, does it do it for faces or people? Can it mistake some blurry blob for a blurry person and add detail, creating extreme pareidolia?

go to BOKatTOOTdotCAT Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon
Regarding "the Moon […] looks the same for everyone, and everyone knows what it looks like," do they? Everybody knows things "like the back of [their] hand," but when TASKMASTER did a task on that, the contestants had a hard time finding the photo of their own hand among a wall of hundreds.

If you presented a hundred people with ten plausible looking pictures of the Moon, moving big craters around, or radically altering the shape of maria, I bet at least a third, more likely half, wouldn't be able to pick out the correct picture.

Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon
On the one hand, why not. It's not really a lie any more than a blurry photo would have been, and people will be happier with the results.

On the other hand, if anything unusual happens to the moon like a new big crater from an impact, people with Samsung phones or similar image enhancement tech won't be able to get a picture of it.

Adrian Hon Mar 11, 2023

@petealexharris yep, exactly. Would make for a good short story!

Mark Saltveit Mar 11, 2023

@petealexharris @adrianhon Why not? Because it's false, a lie. If you start there, without notifying users, what's to stop a company or government from replacing photos with substantively different ones?

Photos of the J6 insurrection could be "enhanced" to ones showing peaceful "tourists" hugging police officers.

Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫Mar 11, 2023

@taoish @adrianhon

Which I'm sure would be convincing until you count their fingers.

But there's nothing to stop a government doing that whether Samsung make moon photos prettier or not. Not everything is a slippery slope.

Mark Saltveit Mar 12, 2023

@petealexharris @adrianhon it remains a lie when Samsung does it though. Without asking and receiving explicit permission, they're just deleting your photo and sneaking in another one. Which is bizarre and controlling.

♪ Octavia con Amore ♬Mar 12, 2023

@taoish @petealexharris @adrianhon Consent, consent, consent, consent, seriously, consent, ...

Sean Murthy Mar 11, 2023

@taoish @petealexharris @adrianhon IIRC the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial excluded some pictures for the reason the phone/camera may not have produced a true replica of the scene, due to "image processing".

Mark Saltveit Mar 12, 2023

@smurthys @petealexharris @adrianhon interesting! Any details on what the processing did?

Sam L.Mar 12, 2023

@smurthys @taoish @petealexharris @adrianhon this is one big concern I have. I was concerned that AI editing like this can (and apparently has) make it so an image taken in good faith may be inadmissible as evidence. This feels like something users need to know about. Of course, you can often save RAW files these days but I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea about the admissibility of those either.

@petealexharris @adrianhon Because the AI isnt just putting known pictures of the moon over it, changes to its surface will still show up

The post doesn't have me convinced really. It's no surprise they use AI to enhance their 100x zoom pictures, but in all examples it's very clear it's just working with the data it is served. I don't find the examples to be shocking at all, they match the blurrry version quite well, and the clipped version at the end of their post seems to look clipped on their Samsung example too?

Anyway run a blurry picture through most upscaling algorithms (meant to add detail) and it should get it right as long as some detail was still there. Blury images is that these algorithms are trained on for years.

Schlaftablette Mar 12, 2023

@Purple @petealexharris @adrianhon There is also this post which shows that even if a smiley-shaped crater would suddenly appear on the moon's surface the Samsungs would perfectly capture it. 🙂

https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/l7ay2m/analysis_samsung_moon_shots_are_fake/

ANALYSIS - Samsung Moon Shots are Fake

Posted in r/samsung by u/moonfruitroar • 415 points and 57 comments

reddit

@fernsehchat @petealexharris @adrianhon uhm, I fail to understand how this is bad? If anything this proofs that Samsung just uses upscaling / sharpening AI and not overlays known images of the moon

Using AI for sharpening is nothing new

Schlaftablette Mar 12, 2023

@Purple @petealexharris @adrianhon
Misunderstanding, I agree with you. It's not bad.

@fernsehchat Ah sorry, my fault :)

John Schrag Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon I was out to dinner with a friend on Thursday, who showed me a picture of the moon he had taken with his new Samsung phone. I jokingly suggested they used AI to do image recognition and swap in a picture from the internet. I guess I’m not as funny as I thought.

In a weird way, this brings photography closer to painting, where the artist can paint what was there, rather than what may have been actually visible in that moment.

Kevin Marks Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon When flickr first published their "find photos by location" API I suggested that they make an app that replaced your fuzzy phone photo of $POPULAR_LANDMARK with a clearer one from a better camera in nicer weather.
Now Google Photos taunts me with "similar shots" notifications of collages with cheesy music from my regular dog walking route.

varx/social Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon I think I remember some company even *advertising* that they did exactly this (with the moon).

HumorlessWokescold Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon weird to make this default rather than an option. Almost feels like a lie.

@adrianhon Just reproduced this on a Galaxy S21 and it works indeed. Zoom level needs to be crazy high (30x or higher) for the AI to step in, but it reproduces in every shot.

@adrianhon Neat, I can even paint a smiley face on the blurred moon image, and as long as the modification does not deviate too much from the real thing the algorithm duly turns that smiley into moon craters and canyons.

nikolawannabe Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon does Samsung even know what its image AI is trained on? Could be that when they released the phone the statement was true and then someone tweaked the training set because it produced better output this way, and, voila

Mary Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon My moon photos with my telescope & iPhone. Mine are real.

FoolishOwl Mar 11, 2023

@adrianhon Plato's Cave is getting worse.

@adrianhon Today's fraud brought to you by ... tidal locking!