In NewScientist (16 March 2019, paywall), Donna Lu notes that our smartphone cameras have been enhanced so much that, well, they no longer record reality any longer, but replace it:
THE phrase “the camera never lies” has never been so wrong. Artificially intelligent smartphones are now editing pictures in real time to create images that can’t be produced by conventional cameras. These enhancements, known as computational photography, are changing the way we view the world.
The goal of digital photography was once to approximate what our eyes see. “All digital cameras, including ones on smartphones, have always had some sort of processing to modify contrast and colour balance,” says Neel Joshi, who works on computer vision at Microsoft Research.
Computational photography goes beyond this, automatically making skin smoother, colours richer and pictures less grainy. It can even turn night into day.
These photos may look better, but they raise concerns about authenticity and trust in an era of fakeable information. “The photos of the future will not be recorded, they’ll be computed,” says Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab.
The endangered activity that is not mentioned, I noticed, was citizen proctoring of police activities. After all, smartphones are the primary device for recording police misconduct by citizens. Is there anything to stop a policeman from arguing that the photography of his conduct cannot be introduced as evidence because it’s so easily modified?
Of course, this defense is less likely to work if there are more than one recording device employed, but it’s not hard to argue in this Age of the Network that the devices merely coordinated their modifications.
This will not be far in the future, I predict.
