• kratoz29@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Huh, I am sorry, I feel too dumb but I don’t want to live with the doubt, I read the article and the Wikipedia links and I still don’t know how this is a thing, this is the first time I know about it.

    What exactly was the meaning of this image in the tech fields? “What image processing tests”?

    I understand the model is tired of it already, but this won’t disappear from the Internet, how is this article gonna benefit her?

    • reddithalation@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      i think i’ve seen it used to demo different image compression algorithms, things like that. it was used as an easy example test image, but this journal has now banned papers from using it because it is weird and creepy to be using cropped porn for that. this won’t benefit the model, but she was only pushing to ban it because she wants more women in IT fields.

    • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Basically, people working on graphics-related algorithms needed to build a library of standard test images, so that when people published their work in an academic journal, they could easily demonstrate what that algorithm does, in a manner that is fairly obvious to anyone who is familiar with the image.

      So someone, when they needed to pick an image that represents a person, scanned this photograph. And it could be argued that at the time, it was probably an interesting test image for a lot of reasons: person vs background, different textures, areas with soft and sharp focus, etc etc. If you developed, say, an image compression algorithm, those things are going to be headache in all photo portraits.

      It’s probably not the best image by modern standards (being a low resolution scan of a photograph off of a printed magazine - not a photo print scan, not a direct film scan, and not comparable to digital photography). Also, it’s gotten overused to the point of absurdity. (Oh your hot new face detection algorithm works on this image? Well whoop-de-do.)

    • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      Computers are dumb and need to be told how to take the data of an image (stored as a long series of 1s and 0s in memory) and draw it on the screen so you can see it. The people writing the software to do that needed an image to test with, just to make sure everything was working right.

      Either because they were a bunch of lonely geeks in the 70s or they didn’t have any other good photos to scan in, they used a headshot of a PlayBoy model. They couldn’t have known that it would effectively become one of the first digital memes, meaning it’s still semi-frequently used by graphics programmers (professionals and enthusiasts).

      I can’t claim to speak on the model’s motives, but it’s not hard to imagine that having their headshot used in perpetuity without consent would make someone uncomfortable.