It does have the benefit of being impartial, at least in the sense that it’s unlikely that any of us have trained this particular AI to have biases towards our own photographs.

Having an AI judge a subjective criteria like “aesthetics” is quite humorous. I like it, though!

I was wondering about this. I found rate-my-photo.com while searching around to see if the technology existed, but wasn’t very convinced - it only gives a number score rather than articulating any of its metrics, and feeding it a completely blank black square gets a rating of 3.18 out of 10. We should agree on using a specific version of the tech if a useful one exists.

Adding the rating to the score is going to reward trying and retrying different photos to get a slightly better rating. We could just say 10 points for anything rated above 5.

(Ah, I was responding to an old version of this post that didn’t have the URL in the flavour text box.)

I like the suggestion of a floor, but would prefer it to be higher, e.g. 10 points for a rating of 7.5 or higher.

Added your suggestion, 10 points for any score greater than 6

Okay JonathanDark, I’ll make it 7

Thanks! It still doesn’t address Kevan’s issue of finding a site that breaks down the metrics used to determine the score, but I don’t know what else is out there. rate-my-photo might in fact be the current best option.

Just for fun I scored all our snaps to date, only one made it across the threshold of 7 with a score of 7.89 (snap 018).  The average was around 4.9. However these pictures were not composed to be highly “Aesthetics”

I did pass a control group through of a random 6 shots from my personal photo gallery that I thought were “nice”.  Only 3 of 6 scored above 7. Most were close with the average being 7.15.

6 might be nice middle ground.

21 4.5
20 4.59
19 4.16
18 7.89
17 5.5
16 3.6
14 5.15
13 4.31
12 3.18
11 4.45
10 3.18
9 6.13
8 4.87
7 5.89
6 5.29
5 5.85
4 4.87
3 3.88
2 4.73
1 5.99

Control Set:

6.55
8.09
8.09
6.13
6.83
7.25

I’m actually ok with the fact that 7 is hard to get on a photo. For 10 points (which is more than the typical score a Seeker gets on any one Snap for their Private Criteria) it should be hard to get.

If we find that no one is able to achieve it after a while, someone can Propose an adjustment to the min score. If people aren’t trying, the amount of points could be raised as additional incentive to try for aesthetics points over satisfying Private Criteria. There’s nothing wrong with having tension over the two.

I do not like the idea of letting AI decide what is “aesthetically pleasing”. AI needs to stay out of art.

“Optimise for AI score” is a nice idea for a photography game, but seems likely to end up counterproductive when we end up chasing metrics that appeal to an algorithm more than a human. I quite liked my photo of some fallen trees (AI rating 4.59: FAIL), but the algorithm says I actually should have posted this boring photo of a sign instead, which I took on the same walk but didn’t use (AI rating 8.48: BEST PHOTO SO FAR THIS DYNASTY).

I think I kind of like the sign picture better. So there you go. 

I don’t think this is anything more than a score on photo quality.  Things like, focus, differing contrasts, maybe some composition.

And it easy and consistent.  Unlike our rules on Secret Criteria! But whatever….

in favor of Josh’s recently-posted “That’s So Aesthetic”