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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

I think the main use case is "I'm a crummy photographer and all I want is something to remind me that I was there" and "Look at my cat. Look! Look at her!"

That's me. I'm a lousy photographer, as evidenced by all of the photos I shot back when film actually recorded what you pointed it at. My photography has been vastly improved by AI. It hasn't yet reached the point of "No, you idiot, don't take a picture of that. Go left. Left! Ya know what, I'm just gonna make something up," but it should.

I imagine there will remain a use case for people who can actually compose good shots. For the remaining 99% of us, we'll use "Send the camera on vacation and stay home; it's cheaper and produces better pictures" mode.

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As a kid I was taking a photo in a tourist spot with a film camera and standard 50mm lens. An elderly local guy grabbed me by the shoulder as I framed the photo. We shared no common language and he (not so gently) pulled me over to where I should stand to get the better shot.

That would actually be a useful feature, I'm aiming the camera but based on what makes "good professional" photos, it suggests "move to the left so you frame the picture well" or "those two people should be more spread out so its not one person with two heads" etc, kindof like lane warnings on cars.

You don't need AI for taking better photos, for most people the phone just automatically taking a burst/video and picking a frame out for the still or stacking frames would be plenty. Lots of photos suck because of shit lighting. A camera intelligently stacking frames would fix a lot of people's photos.

That's already AI. Auto white balance and ISO are already AI too.

"I'm a crummy photographer and all I want is something to remind me that I was there"

This is fine, and I can take good shots but at the same time? I only care about this level of shot most of the time too!

But then instead of a 20MP image, which:

* takes more space, and ergo, more flash drive space

* more space to store, to backup, to send

* is made 20MP by inserting fake data

Why not have a 2MP image, which is real, and let people's end-use device "fix" it? Because all that post processing can be done when 2x or 4x the view size, too!

Because advertising.

And that's sad. We'd rather think we have a better pic, and destroy the original.

And the space thing is real. Because, that same pic gets stored in gmail with 20 people, backed up, kept in all the devices, and so on!

And the LOL of it all, is that I bet when it is uploaded to facebook... it gets downsized!

edit: in fact, my email app allows me to resize on email, so I downsize that too! Oh, those poor electrons.

This is like Huffman compression on your photos but the AI companies created an exabyte size dictionary and now you can store your photo in a few kilobytes.

The key to all modern "AI" bullshit (ChatGPT, StableDiffusion etc) is that they're just exquisite lossy compressors, where a good-enough perceptual loss function has been learned automatically.

There's nothing wrong with that until people start assuming they're lossless (like Huffman encoding) which they definitely are not. Unfortunately the general public doesn't understand the difference.

I'm a decent photographer and still use my phone for this. It's good enough, and can even skip the AI stuff if I want to. Or even better: I can keep the AI stuff in the raw and edit its impact on the final photo later.

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