Google hired professional photographers to help train its AI camera

How did Google get Clips, its AI-powered camera, to learn to automatically take the best shots of users and their families? Well, as the company explains in a new blog post, its engineers went to the professionals -- hiring "a documentary filmmaker, a photojournalist, and a fine arts photographer" to produce visual data to train the neural network powering the camera. The blog post explains this process in a little more detail, but it's basically what you'd expect for this sort of AI. In order for the software to recognize what makes a good or a bad photo, it had to be fed lots of examples. The programmers thought about not only obvious markers (eg, it's a bad photo if there is blurring or if something's covering the lens) but also more abstract criteria, such as "time" -- training Clips with the rule, "Don't go too long without capturing something."