Rethinking Descriptive Camera in the age of AI
How Implai app appeared
If you don’t feel like reading the text, you can just get the app and try it yourself at implai.app (Apple App Store or Google Play Store).
Many years ago I stumbled upon a very interesting project. It was Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera: https://mattrichardson.com/descriptive-camera
The idea of the project was fascinating: you point the camera at something, press the shutter button, and get a paper with the text description of what the camera was pointing for. I was in awe about this simple but powerful idea. In 2012, when the project appeared, the solution to have this feature was to upload the actual picture to Amazon Mechanical Turk service where real humans described what they saw.
This year, while exploring Azure Cognitive Services, I found the service that automatically (and quite nicely) did what was previously possible only for people: described the picture! Some further research showed that it’s been awhile since such possibility has been enabled by ML, and can now be done even on devices.
So I started thinking about the concept and decided to do something with it. The first idea was to create a simple game where you would take a text “photo” with ML-generated description of something, and challenge your friends to get the same text pointing to what they have at hand. But while continuing to think how ML can describe and adjust the descriptions of what we see, I decided to create something else. The new idea was to not only use ML to describe the image, but also to add some kind of improvement or “vibe” to it, in the same way Instagram introduced filters to regular photos.
This is how Implai app was created, as well as the concept of a “tilter”.
At first I planned it as a simple “two weekends” project, but of course when you start working on something, it’s usually quite difficult to stop:). So now there is an app that allows users to take these text “photos”, share them with anyone, get comments, follow people etc.
Here is how you can do it.
Take a picture. Better of someone nice and cute of course, like Vasia:
Upload it so the image is recognized:
Create a text “photo” with the optional description:
Apply “tilter” to change the text and appearance. And voila, here is your post:
This is basically the main flow in the app, but I encourage you to try it yourself! Here are the links: Apple App Store and Google Play Store . The app doesn’t need your phone number, doesn’t ask for location or contacts. Just email. There is no validation for one-time email services by the way, so feel free to use them if you don’t want to share your real one.
I can imagine the concept from Implai can be a nice way to share our daily life things not as a mere boring text, but also not as photos that sometimes feel a little bit too revealing (and introduce obvious privacy concerns). But maybe I’ll share some more thoughts about it later:).
For now, looking for the app feedback!