Has the World gone mad?

Poole 2009
Originally uploaded by thefatcat44

Now I have heard it all.

Listening to BBC radio recently I heard an interview with James Z. Wang, Associate Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University.

Along with is team he has developed a piece of software called ACQUINE. This stands for Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine.

The role of the software is to analyse a jpeg photograph and then decide on how aesthetically pleasing it is, producing a score as a percentage. You can upload your own images here - http://acquine.alipr.com/ - to see what a piece of software thinks about your favorite photos. If you care.

The software is programmed to look att he rule of thirds, fibonnachi spirals, contrast, colour, saturation, and so on to make it's 'mind' up.

Just take a look at some of the top rated images and soon you will see that, while some images are indeed good, most it likes are very mediocre and some are downright rubbish. But then, that is only mky opinion. Should my opinion as a human count any more than a cleverly programmed computers opinion?

I happen to think it should. I am one of those people who believe that photography is art. I believe that it takes a humans inate perception and ability to be moved by an image to make a decision on whether an image is 'good' or not. I do not want a steam of 1's and 0's to make my mind up for me.

So, while, no doubt, the software is very clever, I have no respect for it's findings. I am sure it could be put to good use - analysing images across the internet, maybe, to identify images that have been stolen and used without the copyright holders consent. Or, perhaps, to match faces found in images of paedophiles siezed in criminal cases and matching them to other images of the same people that may make it easier to identify these criminals. These kinds of uses would be very laudable.

But please don't get a piece of software to try and tell me what images are 'good' and which are 'bad'.