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Near-Future file type concept "Digital Memory"
(lemmy.world)
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.
As someone how enjoys photography, this seems dumb.
This just adds another abstraction layer, on top of all the other abstraction layers, and for what?
Saving storage?
Storage is fairly cheap these days, processing power, less so.
We already have image compression, you don't need to save every raw file (though I save both every raw and jpg I get from my camera), if space is running out, get another harddrive.
I also don't believe that an AI would be able to recreate a picture exaclty the same way every time, even from the same prompt.
You would need to describe the image in exruciating detail to get the AI to draw the same picture every time, that would also take time to generate the image every time you want to see it, sure caches exists, but they take up storage and/or RAM.
The pitch is that everything surrounding the subject is extra, and so it doesn't matter if it's the same every time. It's literally throwing that information away in favor of a simplified description. It's extremely processor-intensive data compression.
That is completely terrible, the background is often critical to the photo, there are only a tiny number of photos where the background might not matter.
The author claims to want to help preserve memories, but to me, it seems like this concept would change existing memories.
I use my photo collection as a way to remember events and places, making the memories clearer when I look at them, I can't imagine a time when I would ever want parts of the image to change on it's own from viewing time to viewing time.
The only kind of photos that this could work for would be stock photos, where the customer won't care if the photo convey a memory or not as long as it convey the message they want.
This is a dumb concept, less dumb in some specific areas, but still dumb, it feels kinda like that woman who tried to restore the painting of Jesus in Spain...