Description of a useful service for web development: a website which wraps a neural network trained to classify images by whether they would look better inverted in a website/app dark-mode, or faded.
A useful web service which does not exist as of 2023-10-16 is an API which analyzes a photograph and reports if it would look bad when inverted/negated. This would be useful for website dark-modes: inversion makes many images (like diagrams) look good in dark mode, but makes other images (photographs, especially of people) hideous to the point of illegibility. There is no simple reliable heuristic for choosing to invert an image, so most website designers settle for the safe but inferior option of fading out images.
However, it is almost certain that a neural network like CLIP, or perhaps even simpler classic machine vision approaches, could detect with ~100% reliability if an image would look bad when inverted.
These would be a bit heavyweight to run in-browser, so an API would be ideal: this could both be run in-browser live, and as a development tool for cached local labels. With server-side caching, a demonstration API could potentially handle millions of requests per day and be run on a minimal budget.
Implemented by InvertOrNot.com as of 25 March 2024.