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zipy124today at 1:18 PM1 replyview on HN

Honestly it's scary how misunderstood this is by the general public, the media and EVEN scientists.

There is a shocking amount of Computer Vision tasks where the scientists claim you can get X info from a picture of Y and it's like, even with ML/AI you can't extract data where there isn't any. The fact I can add an arbritrary amount of high-calorie fat to a meal without changing the appearance by defintion shows it's pointless. A 1000 calorie and 100 calorie milkshake can look identical, and you'd have no way of working that out via an image even if it was a super-intelligent system.

Similarly I see it in things like extracting material of an object from an image of it in serious research papers, which for the same reason cannot be done, since how an object looks has very little to do with what its made of, else painting and other art would clearly be impossible. The information is just not there within the data.


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mortenjorcktoday at 1:27 PM

It’s like CSI “enhance!” AI image upscaling. People will do it, see it fabricated details, and then draw the wrong lesson from it, that “AI fabricates things!” when that is exactly what they asked the model to do and there is no magic math that would extract ground truth that was never in the image to begin with.