

So for example, a research team may decide to not spend money on expensive scientific cameras for monitoring experiment, and instead opt to buy an expensive - but still much cheaper - DSLR sold to photographers, or strap a couple of iPhones 15 they found in the drawer (it's the future, they're all using iPhones 17, which is two generations behind the newest one). "Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) products are packaged solutions which are then adapted to satisfy the needs of the purchasing organization, rather than the commissioning of custom-made, or bespoke, solutions." The first sentence of the linked article describes it: Such as science, military and some types of engineering (e.g. I use it in a way it's used in disciplines that also work with specialty-built, or even custom-built equipment. You're right to compare this to how our brains reconstruct our own memories, and the implications that has for eyewitness testimony should inform how we consider the outputs from these systems.


The point is worth belaboring because people have a tendency to take the output from these systems as Truth, and while they can be interesting and useful, they should not be used for things for which the truth has consequences without understanding their limitations. Similarly, if the photo doesn't provide enough detail to positively identify a person, the "super resolution" one cannot be used to positively identify them either, as it's a guess made from incomplete data, not genuinely new data.
#ADOBE PHOTOSHOP NEW RESOLUTION FEATURE SOFTWARE#
If the photo doesn't contain enough data to actually determine what a given piece of text in the image says, the software can provide a guess, but it's just that, a guess. The data present in the picture is fixed, the software uses that data to build educated guesses on what was actually there. I think this point is worth pushing on a bit harder, which is to say that the "additional details" in the picture are guesses by the software, not actual additional details.
