![]() ![]() And those camera builders had nothing more to do with the eventual image adjustments my camera makes than Google’s programmers had to do with inserting my wife’s face on her body at a different point in time.And it’s not just cameras of course. White balance indeed: ironic racism, in algorithms.And he reminded me that while I don’t know the designers of AutoAwesome “Smile!”, I don’t know the guys who designed the image adjustment algorithms in my camera either. He recounted that at one time there were webcams that were so tuned to particular assumptions, they simply ignored non-caucasians in their algorithmic refinements of images. For example, he pointed out that “white balance” is an internal fiction of cameras, as light never appears quite that way when it hits our eyes and minds. The images they capture aren’t the moments as they were, and never have been. He reminded me that cameras have always done that. I told him that algorithms are, without prompting from their human designers or the owners of the photos, creating human moments that never existed.He was somewhat non-plused. Some may say that, but honestly, I was a bit creeped out.Over lunch, I pointed all this out to my friend Cory Doctorow. Take burst photos, and they AutoAwesomely put together what you meant to capture: a perfectly coordinated smiley moment. I only uploaded two photos from this burst to see which one my wife liked better.So Google’s algorithms took the two similar photos and created a moment in history that never existed, one where my wife and I smiled our best (or what the algorithm determined was our best) at the exact same microsecond, in a restaurant in Normandy.So what? Good for the algorithm’s designers, some may say. Actually, these photos were a part of a “burst” or twelve that my iPhone created when my father-in-law accidentally held down the button too long. Note the position of my hands, the fellow in the background, and my wife’s smile. ![]()
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