The built-in Remaster feature on Samsung phones is supposed to intelligently improve your digital photographs. Here's how one tech site described the feature when it launched in May 2021:
Called 'remasters' in-app, the functionality refines any photo you desire and does that all on its own. The completely automated nature of the solution does limit its usability a bit, but from the limited testing we've conducted so far, the changes it does make are all highly desirable.
As for what "remastering" multimedia entails, the majority of the noticeable improvements revolve around boosted exposure and clarity. Depending on the image, the software might also apply tinted overtones to your image. That particular decision can go either way, though it all comes down to taste; if you like heavily filtered photography, you'll probably enjoy viewing an alternative take on your image library.
It's certainly a neat idea. But, AI being AI, it's also led to some … less than ideal situations. Like fake Moon pics. Or the recent cropping up of baby photos with AI-added teeth.
Sure, it cleans up some of the snot trail — that's a nice touch! — but the reconstituted dental structure here is, uhhh, just unseamly.
Here's how Samsung explained the recent Moon-photo mishaps in a blogpost:
When you're taking a photo of the moon, your Galaxy device's1 camera system will harness this deep learning-based AI technology, as well as multi-frame processing in order to further enhance details.
[…]
It uses an AI deep learning model to detect the presence of the moon and identify the area it occupies – as denoted by the square box – in the relevant image. Once the AI model has completed its learning, it can detect the area occupied by the moon even in images that were not used in training.
It's one thing for the AI to use deep learning to enhance moon pics. It's another thing entirely for deep learning to add fucking teeth.
Samsung's photo 'remaster' knows what this baby pic is missing: teeth [Mitchell Clark / The Verge]
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