this seems super trivial, but I think there’s something beautiful in a ‘camera’ that looks at a 2d image and just returns a number. In reality all digital cameras do this, they just hide behind more front end that converts that number back into something we can recognize as an image, but a barcode scanner doesn’t take any bs and just spits out a number directly. This in theory only works for very specifically formatted images (barcodes), but now AI is able to embed this into semi-normal looking images…
