AI Has Invaded Your Camera

Artificial intelligence is creeping into every piece of technology you own. It’s in your phones, in your computers, and in your speakers, just to name a few. I guess it was inevitable that AI would come for your cameras, as well. Don’t worry—AI isn’t here to eliminate the photographer, it’s simply to make certain more complicated operations a lot easier to perform. Also, this isn’t AI in the movie sense. No cameras are going to launch a robot revolution any time soon—though the DJI RoboMaster S1 looks eerily similar to the T-1 from Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Anyway… The version of artificial intelligence you will see in your cameras is machine learning and it is being used mainly to improve autofocus.

DJI RoboMaster S1 Educational Robot

What is Machine Learning?

A subset of artificial intelligence, machine learning refers to the process of having a machine develop its own operational rules based on a set of data or information. I would say it’s having a computer teach itself what to do. This is, perhaps, the most simple explanation I can come up with, in the hopes of getting the general idea across to more people who may have seen the term “AI” pop up in advertisements. If you are a machine learning/AI expert, I would love to have you post in the Comments section and leave a more detailed definition, but I’m going to move on for the sake of the article.