Deep Angel - AI that erases objects from images

@lukasz_x2 Great question, and I admit I don't know the best answer just yet. Any metadata embedded in media can be altered later on. You could also imagine creating a database of image hashes to check if any image matches a manipulated image. But, of course, an adversary could manipulate the image just enough to avoid a hash collision. You're right to be concerned! I think healthy skepticism of media can be one solution, and one of our goals is to give media consumers a taste of media manipulation such that they're more aware of it when they encounter it in the future.

@le_flaneur – I agree with your point that a database of metadata could be altered in the future, maybe we found a great use case for blockchain. I also agree with you that we should approach media with a healthy skepticism, but I worry that shortly this technology will be so seamless that we will no longer be able to tell its an altered image with our own eyes. Once we reach this point, we will have to be skeptical of all documentation which will prevent us from having a common narrative. This is why I ask can we also include a mechanism that outputs a flag that a moving image has been altered by erasure.

@lukasz_x2 We are saving image hashes. The tricky thing with flags is there's AI to erase that too! The issue of media manipulation is not new--it's just at a greater scale than ever. Here's a quote from a 1985 issue of the Whole Earth catalog: "Your Honor, we cannot accept this photograph in evidence. While it purports to show my client in a hotel bedroom with a woman not his wife, there is no way to prove the photograph is real. As we know, the craft of digital retouching has advanced to the point where a "photograph" can represent anything whatever. It could show my client in bed with Your Honor. To be sure, digital retouching is still a somewhat expensive process. A black-and-white photo like this, and the negative its made from, might cost a few thousand dollars to concoct as fiction, but considering my clients social position and the financial stakes of this case, the cost of the technique is irrelevant here. If Your Honor prefers, the defense will state that this photograph is a fake, but that is not necessary. The photograph could be a fake; no one can prove it isn't; therefore it cannot be admitted in evidence. Photography has no place in this or any other courtroom. For that matter, neither does film, videotape, or audiotape, in case the plaintiff plans to introduce in evidence other media susceptible to digital retouching. -Some lawyer, any day now"

@le_flaneur Thank you for replies. It's good to know that you are saving image hashes, hopefully, there will be a mechanism to display altered hashes. And it's true that the issue of media manipulation is not new, even Roger Fenton’s famous “Valley of Shadow of Death ” photograph of a Crimean battlefield covered in cannonballs was also altered. Stalin's Russia also has a long history of erasing Commissars from official photos. And it's true that now media manipulation is at a greater scale than ever as techniques and tools become more accessible and powerful. Hopefully, as technologists, we also create tools that address these results too. Once again, thanks for the interaction.

@lukasz_x2 And thank you for your comments and ideas!

@bitrewards Agreed! It's a start ;)

@hannahkonnn Thanks for your interest! Deep Angel and SnapSeed are certainly both applications for editing photos. You'll notice there's a bit of a difference in the kinds of things you can edit (automatically removing objects from images vs. professional photoediting features like brush/crop/rotate/repair)

@taichi_yamashita Want to give it another try and let me know if you still see the message? Sometimes if an image is too large it takes a moment to upload before the AI can transform the image.

@ginoplusio Thanks for the support and apologies that you ran into that a couple times. We had about 5,000 users visit the website yesterday, and we weren't totally ready for this scale. The interactive AI is up and running at the moment. Hope you have a chance to try it out!

@le_flaneur Hi Matt! I've talked about the project in this article https://www.dailybest.it/tech/de... - I succesfully tried it only once. In the morning (Italian hour) it's impossibile in these days :-)