13 Computer Vision News A History of Fake Things … Why is this particularly interesting for the computer vision community? When we look at the news in terms of what’s being covered with these new technologies, there’s a lot of concern about generative AI. If you look at the writing around tools like Midjourney, DALL·E, and even the emerging stuff coming out of the research community that’s published at CVPR, it’s very negative. It’s like these things are being used to create photorealistic scenes that will fool people, and that’s the primary reason people are creating. That’s not true at all. I think all of us in computer vision know this. We’re working on these tools because we know people really enjoy creating art with them, telling stories with them, creating games with them, virtual environments. The use cases, as far as I can tell, are basically positive. Sure, there are a few bad actors out there, but that’s not the mainstream. Can you tell us a bit more about the history of all this? I think what will really intrigue the computer vision audience is the book’s coverage of the history of photography. Obviously, the whole field is based around digital images – those can be still images or video – but I think what’s surprising to many people is that we don’t really think about where the camera came from or who was using the camera. The book, for instance, looks at how photo editing came to be. A really interesting anecdote: the camera was invented in the mid19th century. What’s interesting is you think, okay, this is very crude technology. It’s very basic. People were just basically capturing images, and that was it. That’s not true at all. As soon as the camera is invented, one of the early inventors of the camera process fakes the first photograph, and it just spirals from there. Darkroom photographers get really good at editing photos, like editing the negatives. They’re able to create effects that are very similar to facial filters on the Internet. If you’re using Instagram, you can clean up your complexion and add all sorts of fantastic effects. You do that in the 19th century, too. This was well known. It was a manual process. Some technician in the darkroom had to modify the negative, but it was pretty standard. In fact, it was so standard that when you’d sit for a portrait in the 19th century, just as an ordinary person, you would often be presented with a catalog of special effects. You could order it as an add-on to your photos. It just goes from there. None of this is new. People love the modifications. That’s part of the fun of it. Does this mean the ancient photos we see today may not be entirely loyal to reality? Correct. In fact, the camera was really never intended to capture some objective reality. Again, there are so many ways to modify a photo. The book looks at a lot of
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc3NzU=