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0 pointsinaros1mo ago0 comments

>> I'm curious how the starless versions are created.

Its done with using dedicated astrophotography software (StarXTerminator). Example: https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/

So these are more artistic photo works than real science photos...

Rod Prazeres the Astrophotographer, has given this interview where he talks about the process: https://www.astronomy.com/observing/the-astrophotography-of-...

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teraflop1mo ago

So this part of the blog post is essentially false: "no generative AI of any kind"

I have yet to see a precise technical definition of what "generative AI" means, but StarXTerminator uses a neural network that generates new data to fill in the gaps where non-stellar objects are obscured by stars. And it advertises itself as "AI powered".

cj1mo ago

I don't consider photos I take on iPhone to be "AI generated" or even "AI augmented" even though iPhone uses neural networks and "AI" to do basic stuff like low light photography, blurring backgrounds, etc.

teraflop1mo ago

I agree that I wouldn't call these photos "AI generated", because the majority of what you're seeing is real.

But that's very different to saying that no generative AI was used at all in their production. "AI augmented" sounds pretty accurate to me.

Likewise, if someone posted a photo taken with their iPhone where they had used the built-in AI features to (for instance) remove people or objects, and then they claimed that no AI was involved, I would consider that misleading, even if the photo accurately depicts a real scene in other respects.

hatthew1mo ago

As a photographer and machine learning guy, I would call a lot of modern phone photos AI augmented. AI to stack photos or figure out what counts as the background is a little bit of a gray area, but an img-to-img CNN is about as close as you can get to full AI generation without a full GAN or diffusion model.

inarosOP1mo ago

So funny people are downvoting you...

https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/

“StarNet is a neural network that can remove stars from images in one simple step leaving only the background. More technically, it is a convolutional residual net with encoder-decoder architecture and with L1, Adversarial and Perceptual losses.”

dotancohen1mo ago

  > So these are more artistic photo works than real science photos...

I disagree. If there are many flies around a statue, and I photograph the statue but remove the flies in the photo (via AI or any other technique), then I'm still producing an image of something that exists in the world - exactly as it appears in the world.

I agree that the claim "no generative AI used" is technically incorrect, but I do feel that the image does not contain any AI-hallucinated content and therefore is an accurate representation of reality. These structures appear in the image exactly as they exist in nature.

robotfelix1mo ago

AI-related definitions aside, if it's a strictly subtractive/destructive tool that only removes light, it's hard to characterise as "generative" and arguably not much different to filtering frequencies!

teraflop1mo ago

It's not just "removing light", because if you removed all the light from stars, you would be left with black spots instead of white spots. The stars are bright enough to completely saturate a region of the image sensor. So there was actually no data recorded about what was in that particular part of the nebula or whatever.

The "generative" part is that the algorithm is filling in a plausible guess as to what would have been observed if there was no star "in the way".

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teraflop1mo ago

So this part of the blog post is essentially false: "no generative AI of any kind"

cj1mo ago

teraflop1mo ago

I agree that I wouldn't call these photos "AI generated", because the majority of what you're seeing is real.

But that's very different to saying that no generative AI was used at all in their production. "AI augmented" sounds pretty accurate to me.

hatthew1mo ago

inarosOP1mo ago

So funny people are downvoting you...

https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/

dotancohen1mo ago

  > So these are more artistic photo works than real science photos...

robotfelix1mo ago

teraflop1mo ago

The "generative" part is that the algorithm is filling in a plausible guess as to what would have been observed if there was no star "in the way".

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