Why do people fall for it so easily? Is it just laziness? Rush to finish things? We are so much better at creating new things that using the tech feels like cheating to ourselves.
The issue here is you're trying to make something a binary that is a continuum. Humans are tool users and the vast majority of animals depend wholly on their bodies to accomplish everything. It's our greatest strength and weakness.
>We are so much better at creating new things
Are we? If this were really true we'd have had rockets at least 10 thousand years ago if not more. Actual 'new' creations that are not mixes of previous things are incredibly rare and most of those are found by shear luck with interacting with the natural world. We love telling ourselves a particular story about how creative and wonderful and fucking great we are but the vast majority of human behavior, including my own is just an iterative copy of other humans behavior.
Yes it is my personal belief that we are definitely much much better at creating than AI models, which the only thing they do is output an empty and dull regurgitation of its training. There's nothing truly personal and original coming out of it when it comes to creating music, literature, art, etc.
Do you know why I am so against all this hype? Because it is a poison for the mind, it deprives you from thinking from understanding and from questioning things by ourselves, and I'm already witnessing AI junkies that consume and take for granted every single output from a model.
We have already proven that most social networks are toxic and detrimental to people, especially teenagers. On top of that now add no thinking for ourselves anymore.
Why think if you can now outsource it to a computer, right?
I guess those AI models were trained on solutions to Navier-Stokes and a proof of the Quasi-Riemann hypothesis.
> Do you know why I am so against all this hype? Because it is a poison for the mind, it deprives you from thinking from understanding and from questioning things by ourselves, and I'm already witnessing AI junkies that consume and take for granted every single output from a model.
This argument has been made against every human innovation, including writing. Maybe it's true this time but I doubt it.
> Why think if you can now outsource it to a computer, right?
I was already outsourcing plenty to the wikipedia, do-yourself-youtube videos, and so on. This doesn't seem that different.
When I revealed it was AI written everyone immediately ate their words and said they hated it all along and it was obviously derivative.
(throwaway because when I posted this under my main account I started getting death threat emails. like, grow up.)
Wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades that we have to X-ray the participants in hand competitions for robotic enhancements.
I am consistently surprised by the levels of self-righteous hubris in the techbro community. People rationalising horrible behaviour and perpetuating the tragedy of the commons, just with computers.
I'm old enough for nostalgia so i regularly find myself pining for the days when the software industry was smaller and the nerds arena was not taken over by the MBA types and temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Of course it is! You post process a picture you took with your camera. As a photographer, can you open paint/photoshop and create a picture out of nothing and submit it to this contest without it being considered cheating?
Why don’t we allow scooters in 100m sprints in track and field events?
But a damned shovel cannot create the dirt it digs.
AI is not a shovel. A shovel digs faster than hands, but it is still digging in the ground and cannot unearth anything that wasn't there.
Generative AI tooling creates things that weren't there. It is not deterministic and not compatible with the spirit or rules of creative competition.
Drugs allows you to cope with hard things or allows you to escape the toll you have to pay.
Similarly, AI allows brain to do more with less energy expenditure. This is why it looks so tasty and is very addictive.
Your brain doesn't work at that hard, AI allows this, however there's no free lunch on that planet. The effort you give into something returns as quality and finesse, however it's tiring as well.
Addiction is a complex is a hard problem regardless what you are addicted to, it's not a light or easy matter to discuss, though.
It's like anything goes in most human endeavors. Society is winging it; duct-taped solutions abound. Most people lack taste or a keen eye for quality, and only notice when there is something seriously wrong. Even then, politics and all sorts of other concerns skews how people respond to things. This is why we complain about AI slop in the fields we know about, while the public at large think AI is the best thing after sliced bread.
Faced with this, unless someone is really passionate about their work, they eventually kind of tune out, and then look for how to expend the least effort possible to get whatever (uncertain or politicized) reward they can in their endeavors.
Edit: an earlier statement from Nikon said that he was complying with the investigation and "At this time, we don't see that any rules were violated" https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck4gjn1yzprno
As it happens, the final decision is not that the disqualified photographer was intentionally cheating, but that the video was ineligible for the competition.
This is already present for the last decade. It's the foundation which makes "sports DSLRs" possible. AI here is not what we know as today's "AI". These are specialized models baked into DSPs to run at inhuman speeds. In Sony's case it's phase data, image itself, information from the lens, and sometimes the accelerometers on camera. This is not making something up from thin air.
AI assisted autofocus is smarter phase detect autofocus. Subject tracking is an educated guess for where the focus shall move, based on movements in the image.
My ~20 year old Nikon D70s has a 1004 pixel "scene detection and metering" sensor "trained" on thousands of images to make educated guesses in full-frame metering mode to exposure correctly. This is in no way helping or altering the image in any way. Same for faster autofocus and object tracking.
Exposure, white balance, noise reduction, color correction, HDR et al can be all achieved with deterministic and traditional algorithms as well. Some of these processes have history in film photography and carried over to digital from analog. Some photographers are famous for their darkroom treatment of their shots during development.
Processing an image with deterministic algorithms using the data in the raw photo is fine. This is how darkrooms work as well. However, guessing things, altering images by adding something which was not there and claiming otherwise is not acceptable. This can be a new element inside the scene or pixel details which was not resolvable by the lens/sensor/film to begin with. Both are "photomanipulation", not photography.
I guess the key point is that use of features needs to be adopted slowly in competition so that it doesn't turn into a materials sport where it's just the most expensive equipment winning.
AI photo editing is surely a competition-worthy art of its own.
Edit: moot point; it's object recognition to find the auto-focus target, not applying digital refocusing.
AI assisted autofocus and object tracking doesn't alter the image after capture. It just moves your focus point and tries to keep the object optically in focus during the half-press phase.
The most expensive equipment doesn't give you any advantage in composing, exposure, etc. If you're shooting birds, you need some tracking capabilities and fast focusing lenses. These are not expensive because they post process the image, but they have expensive glass, fast motors and powerful DSPs to track that bird in that frame. If you can't frame the bird and press the shutter the right moment, you're toast.
Nobody is using relighting tricks like Nikon D-Lighting in competitions, it'll disqualified anyway. I'm not sure my Sony has similar post processing options, even.
These are shot with a D70s: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/39910477633/, https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/41901384135/in/photo..., https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/53363865806/
This is shot with an iPhone 5, at 4AM: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/29340231528/in/photo...
None of them are post-processed with AI tools. Heck, AI is in today was not even a dream when I processed these. Pocket Tiger has been denoised using Profiled Denoise feature of Darktable if I remember correctly. It's taken at Maximum ISO of D70s, which made it a colorful mess, recovering that image in post-processing was a miracle of its own.
> into a materials sport where it's just the most expensive equipment winning.
It's easy to take bad photos with good cameras. Also it's easy to take good photos with bad cameras, as well. It's a squarely skill sport. Equipment can't help you beyond a certain point, and you need to be able to demand that from your camera first.
> AI photo editing is surely a competition-worthy art of its own.
We have photomanipulation competitions for that.
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
Nikon gets to gatekeep their competition however they like. Personally I think it would be a shame to reward photographers for the work they do outside taking the shot and light editing/compositing. What's the point of a competition if you're not going to enforce high standards and challenging constraints?
This is why I like Darktable's profiled denoiser. It works by using a noise profile measured with a deterministic process using the camera you're targeting. In short, it's tailored to your sensor by profiling your sensor.
It makes no sense why you’d do something so foolish.
Chicanery seems to scale anywhere that there are insufficient institutional barriers.
Especially since everyone else is aware of that. If you don't take the risk, you will lose to someone who did and got away with it.
This researcher is in China, where I gather the competition is even fiercer than in the West. I do not know that for a fact, but if it is true it makes it even clearer.
Viewed that way it's not foolish. It's actually mandatory. And it's just going to get more prominent as the AI makes fewer mistakes, and competitors get better at spotting and removing them.
Similarly, I expect "raw"-ness to gain on value. Photos untouched by AI or filters. Physical objects. The non-digital. Who knows, maybe physical media will make a comeback.
Either way, it's not good times we're living through, and I don't particularly appreciate all of this happening after *just* becoming an adult in the world.
That's the reason why there's a "second chance" pool where things can be revived.
Just continue to share interesting links, comment on topics you care about and don't worry about the silly internet points.