Instead, they throw problems and solutions at them and say, "Okay, now figure out how to get from A to B." The more cases the networks have to chew on, the cleverer the solutions they invent. These programs don't work by some programmer handing them a finished set of rules and equations. Now we've got software, based on some deeply learnt neural networks, that appears to be doing the real thing, making the same kind of common sense decisions about a photograph that we make when we look at it. They don't really understand a photograph, not the way we do. Sure, we've got algorithms that do a fair job of brute-force faking it, but it's pretty obvious that they're faking it with frequency filters and threshold discriminators and the like. Until recently, we could imagine that this kind of discrimination was also a sophisticated function, something that would require a pretty high level of real AI to achieve. 'Cause we're smart, sophisticated real-world data processing machines. We know and can see the difference because, well, we just know. When we run noise reduction, we don't want it to degrade the real image detail and tonality. When we sharpen or enlarge a photograph, we want the real detail improved and enhanced, not the grain and the artifacts. But by and large, we know the difference. Sure, there are the edge cases, where the subject detail is getting so similar to the grain/noise in the photograph that we're not sure if the feature we're looking at is real or an artifact of the media. As humans, we look at a photograph and we can easily figure out what is noise and what is detail, because we just know what the world looks like. Consider the sorts of manipulation and filter programs we use routinely, like noise reduction, enlargement, and sharpening routines. But it's pretty damned good at dealing with everyday life and figuring out what's important and what's ignorable. Common sense is not, in fact, good at dealing with the esoteric. Everyone here has likely had the experience of getting into an argument with somebody who, backed into a losing corner, utters those fateful words-"but, it's just common sense that." What then comes out of their mouths is invariably wrong. "Sophisticated" isn't the same as intelligent dogs and cats exhibit a great deal of common sense, but down at their level of mentation.Īt the human level, common sense isn't necessarily either smart or correct. Believe me, we should be taking them seriously.Ĭommon sense is something that we've thought of as being a fairly sophisticated function, a way of distilling down the otherwise unfathomable complexity and intricacy of the world into something we can manage almost intuitively. I think it's right and significant, and it lets us take these programs seriously. I think there's a better descriptor for what these programs do: Artificial Common Sense. (What are those promoters going to do when we get genuine AI? Call it AIFRTTH-Artificial Intelligence, For Real This Time, Honestly? Maybe that's the first question we should ask real AI, if we ever get it.) But Artificial Intelligence? Nah, I don't think so. They're popping up all over, and they do amazing things. Now it's been degraded to refer to any system that uses one of the deep learning networks (there are many different flavors of those) to learn how to do a sophisticated task. The ultimate goal may be (trans)human level, but it's gradable down-you could have parrot-level AI, or cat-level or even goldfish-level (currently, we've reached the some-but-not-all-insects level of AI). I am irritated by the success that corporate/marketing droids have had in co-opting the term "A.I." That stands for "artificial intelligence," and has, in the past, commonly meant some kind of general intelligence that deals with the real world in all its perplexity. It'll just take me a bit to get us there. Please bear with me, Faithful Readers.this is a photography column.
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