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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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I wonder if film will make a comeback. ("I'll believe it when I see the negatives.")

I think it is trivial to also create negatives of whatever with modern tech.

It was trivial in the 90s in that film printers existed -- I think you could still tell the difference under forensic examination though, even with a modern update. (Which would be very very expensive -- Lightjet machines still have niche usage, mostly for printmaking -- but are NLA new and IIRC max out at around 4k dpi -- which would still be easily distinguished from a trad negative. A good used unit like this runs to six figures, and nobody is making any more of them.)

Why couldn’t you just take a film picture of the AI generated scene? There’s no depth to film, a flat image should be indistinguishable from the real thing.

35mm has a grain density that works out to about 5.6K, so if you have an 8K monitor then you shouldn’t be able to detect pixelization.

It doesn't work -- the grain density of 35mm film might be more or less than that depending on the film, but the grain is randomly distributed in both space and size rather than on an even grid like a monitor. You'd still see pixels -- probably quite casually if you used an 8k screen, and forensically to quite a high resolution I'd think.

The Lightjet machines work because they are sort of like a laser printer without the toner -- the 'pixels' are obtained by shooting the paper/film with a laser, so they bleed into each other nicely, don't staircase diagonals, etc. TBH I'm not sure that you couldn't tell the difference between even a negative made that way and an optical one under a microscope or something -- Lightjet was/is mostly used for prints (very not demanding resolution-wise) or copy-negatives (much more demanding depending on neg-size, but the intended final output is usually still a print, so there's some wiggle room there)

You can definitely take pictures of a screen to do digital to film transfer. The service I've used (quite a while ago) used a CRT screen, which might help prevent obvious moire artifacts. I suspect it would be easily forensically detectable, thouh.

Certainly it is literally a possible thing to do -- it also was possible in the 90s, and people used the $200k film recorders instead to even get to magazine-imagesetting standards of quality. Even a copy-negative (film-to-film) is potentially distinguishable from a true one; making pixels look like film under magnification is a harder problem. Nation-state actors/TLAs might figure something out if the incentives were large enough, but for most normal situations "let me examine the negatives" would be good enough proof of authenticity.

Yep, exactly my thoughts. This is why if you’re ever doctoring documents (shame!) you should doctor then print then rescan.

Also make sure you don’t use the default Word settings if you’re faking something supposedly written on a typewriter.

Hey, they would've gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling bloggers ...

Far from it, given how few companies can deal with negatives at all anymore. Sure, such tech could be developed, but there is no financial incentive for the required scale to make it viable.

The incentive will arrive as soon as people start saying "I'll believe it when I see the negatives."

Not so. It's not enough for people to desire negatives. There has to be a mass of people who're willing to pay significant amount of money for that. As it is, there are no signs towards that and all signs towards the exact opposite direction (newspapers aren't exactly doing great financially).

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