This is an idea I’ve been toying with for a bit. There is a ton of media that includes unimportant information that doesn’t need to be stored pixel perfect. Storing large portions of the image data as text will save substantial amounts of storage, and as the reality of on-device image generation becoming commonplace sets in digital memories will become the main way people capture the world around them. I think this will inevitably be the next form of media capture (photography and video), not replacing other methods/ formats, but I could see things like phone cameras having saving images as digital memories set to default to save on storage.
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currently, storage space is significantly cheaper than all the cpu power needed to generate the images from a text description. also, what if you actually wanted to view the backgroud of the object? and where’s the advantage besides an at best 40 % increased storage space edficiency? after all, people are taking pictures to actually capture the moment. else they would do voice memos all the time.
Which is why I wanted to include video in my concept because video file sizes are getting out of control.
As a way to store information it’s really overly complicated and comes with all the downsides of human memory.
As a way to explain how imperfect human memory is or as a way to add deliberate “memory” decay to an artificial intelligence however it could be useful.
Are they? Video compresses really well these days. How does replacing real footage with generated content that cannot be accurate better than accurate video?
The mother of all lossy compression
I’m sorry, but no. Not only does that invoke a ton of extraneous processing on both ends (when saving and when recalling the image), but the rest of the image is still important, too! Can you imagine taking a photo at a family gathering, and then coming back later to see randomly generated people in the background? A photograph isn’t just about the “subject”, it’s often about a moment in time.
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You wouldn’t use it if you didn’t want to, but I actually think family photos are great for this. The focus is family in the photo, not what the background details are. Not a lot of people care how many tree tops are in a graduation photo. Our memories work the same by storing the most important parts in the best detail, and redrawing other details when accessing the memory. And as handheld computation improves it will be a small task to render each image on view.
You misunderstand. You take a picture of, say your dad at a family reunion, and in the background the rest of your family is just milling around. That’s not the subject, and so the AI model saves it as “people doing stuff” or whatever. When you load that photograph, the people in the background will be generated, and they won’t be your family.
This is all beside the fact that the AI may decide your subject is different from what you think it is.
This is just an extremely unreliable form of data compression, and extremely unnecessary. Phones and cameras can currently save hundreds or thousands of photographs locally, and cloud storage can save millions for free, and even more for extremely cheap. You’re solving a non-existent problem by shoehorning AI image generation in where it’s not needed.
What you think of as important may change over time, as well - with the solution as written, you’d need to decide what the “subject” is at compress time, but what if you later realise that’s the last ever photo of grandma, or the AI decides that you were wearing different shoes than you actually were. Worst case, you need to rely on some detail in a photo later, like to absolve you of a crime.
I don’t think this will work well and others already explained why, but thanks for using this community to pitch your idea. We should have more of these discussions here rather than CEO news and tech gossip.
It could be an interesting idea, but would be terrible to implement for anything where accuracy mattered.
Generally when you’re doing video or image editing, you don’t want the image to change after you’re done saving it. That would be a loss of hundreds of hours of work in some cases. And if you’re working on something where, small details matter, those might get lost in translation.
So I take a photo of a friend and then the ai changes them and it’s no longer them.
Actually sounds like a black mirror episode. So… congrats on that?
Reminds me of this.
That is cool.
This is a really cool idea. Other posters here have explained why it isn’t a good idea, but I still think it is neat. Maybe there is a niche edge case use for such a thing? If nothing else it is very scifi
One use case might be for asset store pages, to show the object in various environments.
Maybe even have a field where you can input a description of the environment where you plan to use the asset
Agree it’s fun to think about even if not practical. If anything reminds me of how my own memory works, where it’s more like a description of what I saw than an image.
I love this and have had similar thoughts in relation to my non verbal kid wanting to keep memories in a way they can point out different parts and link together multiple things to make new stories or comments or hypotheticals. Important to have the context and the parts and named things all relating together. I don’t know much about it, but there is a thing called “sidecar” file that can be associated with media. There are some moves to make EXIF data more standardized. So there’s a chance this could be done in an open format.
OP sounds like he’s making a data compression pitch, but I think you have the better idea. I think surrounding the picture with a lot of contextual data about when/why/how this picture was taken will absolutely help recall and connecting to related concepts.
How is subject determined? Did you manually cut out that image?
I like the idea. Basically turning b Roll and background info into reproduceable info. So you could for example get a pixel perfect 8k view of say the main subject and edit around that instead of needing actual 8k of unimportant background scene.
I think an added one would trying to explore more with latent space to see how precise would might be able to get with the AI compressed details.
Please don’t patent it
Op, please patent it so no other company can use it for the next 20 years
/s
