As a photographer, I find it disturbing people are so willing to alter reality just for a cleaner picture.
I’d ask people to consider carefully before blithely doing this.
What you created with three taps Adam was indeed a ‘cleaner’ image - albeit with clearly visible ‘photoshopped’ artefacts.
But now you a have false memory of the day.
The resultant picture shows the same moment of two happy people with medals but it seems the event wasn’t important enough to have a PA system with large speakers.
Just two people in front of a minimalist shed.
That wasn’t what happened on the day - it makes the moment seem less important and once people see the artefacts left by removal of objects why should they believe the people really won the medals - maybe they were photoshopped in ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The increasing use of the erase ‘feature’ will totally undermine a photograph’s value - and create false memories.
Consider this scenario. My family is out walking in the woods. I take a photo of my daughters walking by. When I come home, I discover that a person who I did not see at the time makes a distracting part of the image. Is it wrong to remove that person?
Why not? Obviously there’s a line that can be crossed of when a photo is no longer a photo, but photographers have been manipulating images for over 100 years. Even just choosing which film or lens to use changes “reality” and isn’t necessarily what you see.
Pro photographers retouch images all the time, removing tiny blemishes and taking out distracting items.
I suppose the line could be things like inserting Uncle Bob in the family photo at the Grand Canyon when in reality he was in the motel suffering with food poisoning, but removing a distracting stranger who walked into your shot just as you pushed the shutter is fair game in my book. (I don’t care if it’s removed via AI or manually in Photoshop – the outcome is the same.)
Years ago my grandpa had a “beach house” (a mile from the beach) with an “ocean view” from upstairs. The only drawback was the ugly telephone/electrical lines going right across the middle of the bit of ocean that could be seen. I took them out with Photoshop (a tedious process 20 years ago), but the result was much better and everyone loved it.
Was it “real?” Not really. If used for marketing purposes to sell the house it would be a lie, of course. But for a picture we could frame and put on the wall it was vastly better!
Why not add Sophia Loren walking along the beach and some dolphins leaping in the air in the background!?
That would be an amazing picture!
I wonder if any family members visiting the beach house after seeing your picture would have been a bit disappointed that the view wasn’t free of wires as your picture suggested.
But yeah in that case no real harm was done but it is a slippery slope.
I’m not saying there is a right or wrong - I just believe that this being so easy from now on will impact people’s faith in photographs (from smartphones in particular.)
You can certainly do whatever you wish for your own purposes I agree.
Here’s another scenario - an emergency appeal goes out for anyone walking in the woods if they saw a man who went missing on the day you were there with your daughters.
(I gather the Apple version keeps the original but don’t know about the others - and maybe you choose to delete the original as you don’t think you’ll ever want to reinsert the man into the picture.)
There are ramifications. That is all that I’m saying.
Photos are always false memories.
Maybe for you - but my photos are an aide to my memories.
It’s a personal decision unless it is journalism or there are contest rules…some people don’t like remixing distraction or adding sunset skies but some are ok with it because there was sunset or clouds earlier or later. Absent the unless situations above…people can and should edit or not as they care. Calling it a fake memory is a little harsh IMO…but to each their own h their own and as a photographer myself I judge whether I like the image or not. How it was edited or produced is down the list of things I pick about…although poor editing downgrades it IMO but it isn’t mine that counts, it’s the photographer’s.
For you as well. Photos are composed, with choices of what to put in and what to leave out. Simply taking a photo changes the reality of the moment: people react to being photographed in ways that change their behavior, eg. James Maas, the retired Cornell psych professor, used to tell a story in class about filming children at play and how for the first few days they would mug for the camera and shift their behavior because they were being recorded.* It took quite a long time for them to settle down, time that almost never happens with everyday photos.
More, memories are false to the reality of what actually happened, as anyone who studied eyewitness testimony in court cases will tell you. Our brains change our memories, alter them, lose details, and generally turn them into something only adjacent to the real experience.
*In those days, film was expensive, so Maas didn’t actually load the cameras for the first few days – once the children settled down, he started the actual recording.
Simply taking a photo changes the reality of the moment: people react to being photographed in ways that change their behavior, eg. James Maas, the retired Cornell psych professor, used to tell a story in class about filming children at play and how for the first few days they would mug for the camera and shift their behavior because they were being recorded.
Yes he would have have recorded it exactly as he remembered: the children mugging for the camera. There is no contradiction or false memory there.
And yes it was a well known tactic for studio portrait photographers to pretend to take the first number of photographs with no film in the camera as the learned through experience that the first batch of photographs were usually not good as the subject hadn’t relaxed yet.
So they said ok I have to reload film and went to put the first roll of film in the camera as they knew the subject is now more relaxed - that’s not a false memory - it’s just a clever way to avoid wasting film. What you end up with are pictures of the subject when they are more relaxed and look better - which is what they would have wanted without having to pay more for extra film used.
That’s not a memory of children playing, that’s a memory of children being recorded playing. That’s different.
So they’re shaping what the photograph records? That’s the point I’m making. It’s not reality, it’s the choice of which reality they’ve decided to record.
And I’ll reiterate my point about memories. They are entirely unreliable as to what actually happened.
That sounds excessive. And there was no view of a beach, just water, so she would have to have been swimming and the size of the period at the end of the this sentence since the water was a mile away.
There’s a huge difference between touching up a photo to make it look better and inserting elements that weren’t there.
But it also depends on the type of photo and its purpose. For casual family pictures, who cares? For a pro trying to sell a “perfect” picture, a little touching up is par for the course. For evidence in a court case or a real estate transaction? No retouching at all is acceptable.
Those three distinctions are appropriate unfortunately what has provoked the handwringing is that Ai-assisted modification now makes it so easy for anyone to modify a picture in seconds. You can now be on a frontline in Ukraine under fire, add twenty more troops to a picture on your smartphone, and send it off.
There is an effort to develop a standard where photos are cryptographically signed in the camera, encoding GPS, time/date, etc. I haven’t heard much in a while basically because it’s damn difficult. You can’t hang that data off the side of the file you have integrate it into the picture. The whole image would have to be a cryptogram.
In the meantime, beware all family pictures with Sophia Loren at the dinner table.
I tend to get more criticism for not cleaning up photos. “But it would be easy and so much nicer if you removed those aphids/fungal spots/deformed petal/dead leaf/messy pollen/…” To which the answer is usually “What makes you think that those aren’t the subjects?”
A ‘perfect’ flower picture has been manipulated either before or after the shutter is pressed. Pesticides, pruning, careful selection of which bloom…
The indiscriminate use of AI technology to alter or outright fabricate photographic images has a far more destructive influence on our perception of reality than simply removing a distracting element from a personal photo. Before the invention of photography, every drawn or painted image was a selective record of the scene being rendered. In fact, all artists—regardless of their medium—take “artistic license” with their subject matter. This is part of life and part of art.
I think the opposite may well turn out to be the case. People are becoming hyperaware of AI’s capabilities in this regard so now there may well be a healthy skepticism built in about all photos (even real ones) and how “real” they are.
Whether we are skeptical or not, it may soon be impossible to tell the difference between reality and fakery without a forensic examination. We’ll go mad if we start questioning everything and believing nothing.
I’m going to say yes to the subject line. I said that when people started over-using HDR (especially in real estate pix!). That we were bringing up a whole generation of people who wouldn’t be able to appreciate a sunrise or sunset because it didn’t lock like the overdone pix they see.
AI photos are on a whole other level. I am seeing many landscape pictures of public places that are not correct at all.
This is why I think they will have to be some type of international digital watermark or other convention. I have heard the analogy used with currency and how there are accepted parameters for detecting whether it is artificial or not and that is across different countries. Something like this will be needed to identify whether images or videos or “real“ or counterfeit. As a I will improve its capabilities, you are right and that people will start to doubt things even when they show an actual event or image.
