Uh what
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Haha, I wish. I am seriously addicted, drinking 4â5 espressos a day. I have backup coffee machines both at home and the office, and chew beans as a last resort (eg when hiking).
Letâs see how that works out.
mm, a bit to elaborate, this maybe did not came across as I wanted.
What I meant with that, from what I have seen (and I have been in really really poor places) is that even for people that are extremely poor (and thus have no money to spend on anything), they look to make things a bit more beautiful in their lives. Or they will find a way to dress uniquely or standout in a certain way. They are looking for art, even with their limited resources.
Therefore I think that this desire for beauty and uniqueness is very fundamental for being human.
And thus I am not so worried that this whole AI thing will make people forget what quality even isâŚ
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Why do you think that pereonal econcomic standing has an direct impact on peopleâs desire to create or have beautiful things? It seems like a strange line of thought.
I donât think itâs the desire that was the important part (as I understand it, it wasnât being implied that people with meagre resources were simpletons who donât appreciate and desire beauty, or that martinus finds that not being the case surprising), but rather that even people who are poor will do something (make an effort and spend some of their limited resources) to create beautiful things and/or make their surroundings more beautiful, because beauty and art are so fundamentally important to humans.
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My canon camera has AI focus. It looks for faces and open eyes to follow the focus. It works great and provides me with more keepers for event photography. AI focus is great and I would not go back. It would be like going back to horses and carriage once you had a horseless carriage (aka car).
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I certainly agree with that, in part. In a way, cherish pre-2022(ish) stuff a lot more like movies now because they are guaranteed AI-free. And I DO think communities will arise that appreciate art, etc. But I donât think that really removes my fear or the problem either, because it could just mean a small proportion of people with refined tastes who will keep the art alive. Which is not REALLY a problem from a personal perspective, but it still has a pretty big net negative impact on society as many others will be deep in AI, influenced by it, and I think that with its energy use is still a bad thing.
I wasnât really referring to machine-learning algorithms with a well-defined output that can easily be achieved with manual methods given enough time, but about algorithms that modify the content afterwards. I understand thereâs a blurry line somewhere but I do think itâs useful to make a distinction like that.
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But you said: âAI tools were not created by big tech companies to help you with your photography or to take some of the tedium out of creating local masks, but to replace you,â
AI focus on cameras do help my photography and do not replace me. No blurry line for me. AI focus works great.
Well, I was referring to big tech companies like Google and Apple. If Nikon or Sony decides to implement an AF algorithm, then theyâre obviously doing it just to sell cameras.
But even if that algorithm came from Google, then it their ultimate purpose is to replace you. Frankly, it doesnât really matter if there are beneficial side effects like an AF algorithm. I was referring to their ultimate objective, not the proximal one. Of course, there are going to be beneficial and benign side effectsâŚ
So now your are saying that what you wrote in plain English refers to something else than what you wrote?
Of course it matters if there are benefits to AI focus and camera makers implement them. This premise that some corporation wants to replace me sounds like a conspiracy theory.
Iâm done with this thread.
Gone into slow mode to hopefully avoid some bitterness, which I sense mounting.
I am not sure this is the case⌠I think that Google wants to make there products as useful for the greater public as possible to get more data and more money.
So if their phones (or more general their software) is easier to use, gives âbetterâ (in the eyes of the greater public) results, then they are more desirable to be used.
This whole âcreate fake bokehâ thing is an example of that. I can seriously not count anymore how many times I got the remark: wow what iPhone are you using? The background is so smooth and the colours are so popping! While they say photos of my Leica at F1.7.
And that is the what they are after, making their product as appealing as possible to extract more money.
And this whole AI thing is just a new technology to get us hooked and extract more moneyâŚ
One has to realize that the fundamental technology at the bottom of all this is the same. Neural networks are not new, they were described in the artificial intelligence text from my masters program in the early '80s. Neural nets became the foundation of what was originally called âmachine learningâ, with tools to train such from before/after data to compel the net to do similar difference processing for other inputs. If a corner case yielded sub-optimal results, you had (have) to retrain the whole thing with data added to cover the corner case. This is essentially whatâs behind the esoteric autofocus functions, matrix metering, certain denoise, and the like. Same neural net foundation under LLM and the more expansive models of late, larger nets trained on more data.
Currently, these things deployed for general use donât actually add learning to the net, they do pet tricks in the surrounding software. But, that sort of research is on-going, so worry then when that capability is deployed. Even then, the on-off switch is still your friendâŚ
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I didnât know you were on these forums when I posted, sorry to drag you into this!
Regardless of if the tools are meant to âhelpâ or not, I think itâs helpful to be able to draw some line where the tool isnât just helping but taking over the creative process, and I like where you put it (does the tool use a database of other images). That seems to be the point where the tool is probably just pushing your image towards some average of what else itâs seen.
I am not even sure I am allowed to talk about AI on this forum. For me the danger of AI is that it can generate content that is not there. I posted an image of this a couple of days ago. The post was deleted from the forum because it broke the rules of this forum. But on the other hand AI can be a marvelous tool that can restore faded color photos or colorise an old B/W capture. There is no FOSS tool I am aware of that can match this capability. But I am not allowed to discuss that on this forum so I will leave it at that.
What Iâve been seeing is workers being called back to the office, by both companies and governments, against their will. We are seeing employees coming in to the office, grabbing a coffee, and going back home (one major telecom company here recently fired people in bulk for this practice). We are seeing people returning to the office and finding there is nowhere for them to work, because the employer downsized office space during the pandemic.
People have enjoyed their improved work/life balance while able to work remotely. They have benefited by not pissing away a couple of hours a day commuting. They have learned the modern tools that allow them to function at full efficiency without being face to face.
The reasons Iâve seen offered for RTO mandates are:
- Downtown restaurants, etc., have suffered because their clientele are no longer in the area.
- There is significant empty office space downtown.
- Management believes people are slacking off when they are not in the office.
None of these stand up to close scrutiny.
Ahhahaha donât worry. Iâm used to every sort of comment you can imagine when it comes to AI. E.g âitâs just a toolâ, âitâs the ML youâve been using since the 80sâ, ânot much has changedâ, âitâs just hypeâ, âyou can still enjoy your hobbyâ, âart canât be definedâ, âphotography is not reality and itâs anything we want it to beâ, âyou canât do anythingâ, âscrew youâ, etc repeated thousands of times over. You say it, Iâve seen it.
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Whateverâs going on here - I donât know. But I do like your short vids. on Rawtherapee topics.
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A certain Alan Mathison Turing described them in the late 40s although I think there was an earlier paper by some MIT researchers.