Ok, if you take any book, keep it closed, how many times do the letters s, q, d and r appear in the book?
There is no way to know without opening the book and counting, sure, you could make some statisticsl analysis based on the language used, but that doesn’t take into account the font size and spacing, nor the number of pages.
Since the machine only has a photo to analyze, it can only give extremely generic results, making them effectively useless.
You would need to open the food up and actually analyze a part of the inside with something like a mass spectrometer to get any useful data.
I agree with you, but disagree with your reasoning.
If you take 1lb of potatoes, boil and mash them with no other add-ins, you can reasonably estimate the nutritional information through visual inspection alone, assuming you have enough reference to see there is about a pound of potatoes. There are many nutrition apps out there that utilize this, and it’s essentially just lopping off the extremes and averaging out the rest.
The problem with this is, it’s impossible to accurately guess the recipe, and therefore the ingredients. Take the aforementioned mashed potatoes. You can’t accurately tell what variety of potato was used. Was water added back during the mashing? Butter? Cream cheese? Cheddar? Sour cream? There’s no way to tell visually, assuming uniform mashing, what is in the potatoes.
Not to mention, the pin sees two pieces of bread on top of each other… what is in the bread? Who the fuck knows!
It isn’t as magical (or accurate) as it looks. It’s just an extension of how various health tracking apps track food intake. There’s usually just one standard entry in the database for mashed potatoes based on whatever their data source thinks a reasonable default value should be. It doesn’t know if what you’re eating is mostly butter and cheese.
How useful a vague and not particularly accurate nutrition profile really can be is an open question, but it seems to be a popular feature for smartwatches.
I see what you mean, and while you raise a few excellent points, you seem to forget that a human looking at mashed potatoes have far more data than a computer lookkng at an image.
A human get data about smell, temperature texture and weight in addition to a simple visual impression.
This is why I picked a book/letter example, I wanted to reduce the variables available to a human to get closer to what a computer has from a photo.
It needn’t be exact. A ballpark calorie/sugar that’s 90% accurate would be sufficient. There’s some research that suggests that’s possible: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.01082.pdf
You are correct but you are speaking for yourself and not for example the disabled community who may lack senses or the capacity to calculate a result. While ai still improves its capabilities they are the first to benefit.
If i had a big list or directory of a lot of well known books and how many times s, q, d and r appears in them then sure I would be able to make a very good estimate on how many there are from just looking at the cover of the book, with a slight variance being in the editing that version may have. Almost like how a specific type of food will likely have a certain amount of protein fibre etc, with slight variations based on how the cook prepared the food.
I didn’t open the book, someone else looked into the book and wrote it down for me to then read when needed, just like how someone would put in the data for a program to look it up when asked.
