Comment by prmoustache
8 months ago
The weird thing is that people are seemingly enjoying this.
Yesterday we went to a store to have a look at a few smartphone for my partner. She primarily wants a good camera above any other parameter. I was seeing her preferring those that were counterfeiting the reality the most: she was like, "look I can zoom and it is still sharp" while obviously there was a delay between zooming and the end result which was a reconstructed, liquid like distorded version similar to the upscaling filters people are using on 8/16bit game console emulators. I was cringing at seeing the person I love the most preferring looking at selfies of picture of us with smoothed faces and a terrible fake bokeh in the background instead of something closer to the reality.
I’m a photographer, and am on a bunch of beginner photography groups.
These groups used to be a mix of people being confused at how their camera worked and wanting help, people wanting tips on how to take better pictures, and sometimes there was requests for editing pictures on their behalf (eg “I found this old black and white faded picture of my great grandparents, can anyone help restore it?”)
These days, 99.9% of the posts are requests that involve synthesizing an entirely new picture out of one or more other pictures. Examples: “can someone bring in my grandpa from this picture into this other family picture?”. Or “I love this photo of me with my kids, but I hate how I look. Can someone take the me from this other picture and put it in there? Also please remove the cups from our hands and the trees in the background, and this is my daughter’s ex boyfriend please also remove him”.
What’s even crazier is that the replies of those threads are filled with dozens of people who evidently just copy pasted the prompt + picture into ChatGPT. The results look terrible… but the OP is always pleased as punch!
People don’t care about “reality”. Pictures have lost their status of “visual record of a past event”* and become “visual interpretation of whatever this person happens to want”.
There’s no putting back the genie in the bottle.
*: yes, you can argue they were never 100% that, but still, that’s effectively what they were.
"I'm delighted by this picture of some weird cartoon people that are in the same pose as my grandparents" puzzles me deeply, also.
You've never seen those stands at the boardwalk where artists draw caricatures? They're extremely formulaic and rarely resemble the subjects aside from a few distorted features, but humans have being paying other humans to pump out that slop for ages.
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1) This is, amusingly, kind of a shift back to when portraits had to be painted.
2) This seems very similar to me to those weird fuzzy double-exposure, heavily posed portraits that used to be really popular, or in general not that different from going and having family photos taken at a cheap mall photo studio with one of five shitty looking background-tarps.
I suspect there are some interesting class components to that second one (Fussell may even have mentioned it in his book, I can't recall, but it's definitely the kind of thing that probably could have served his analysis) but overall I think the "unwashed masses" have long preferred really shitty, lazily/poorly staged & manipulated photos to authentic ones. Now they can just apply that same aesthetic preference to photos that weren't originally like that.
But people have be editing photos like that before AI and even before Photoshop, I don't see the big deal. What I've seen recently is synthesizing whole new pictures with AI, by training a LoRA on their face and body and asking the AI to create themselves with a specific setting or background.
I value old photographs of my and my family not because they look good or whatever but because they show where we've been and what we've been doing etc. They're documented history. Once you start heavily editing, making them showing things that weren't there, you loose that history. I think that's a loss.
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The motivation behind taking pictures has definitely changed over time. People used to keep them mainly for themselves and their close family. Then they started to share with close and not so close friends. Now they use it to boost their "personal online brand". Yes, it was possible to heavily manipulate pictures with Photoshop, or even in analog photography, but it wouldn't make any sense for most people.
> But people have be editing photos like that before AI and even before Photoshop
Very few people who had the skill, time or money. I think we are now discovering that everybody wants to edit the photos, they just couldn't do it before in what they consider a reasonable amount of effort.
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People were pirating before napster, but napster made it easy, accessable, and let people do it with little to no barrier.
It's the same with this.. yes photo editing could always be done, but it's far easier now to get better results. It's accessibility changes the game
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You'll see the big deal when you realize that you don't trust absolutely any photos or videos of current events unless the photos are provided by a news source that you trust. You'll see the big deal when you take a picture of something real and show it to a friend who isn't interested because they don't think the thing in the photo actually exists.
Young people often ask "what's the point of fine art photography? It's just capturing what I can already see with my eyes, I prefer art like paintings which are more creative and imaginative"
And the answer is often "GOOD photography is about capturing a fleeting moment in time, forever, so that we can enjoy it longer"
But what is happening now is going the other way - people are using photography to be more imaginative, as a creative medium more akin to composing a painting. Transforming reality rather than merely recording it
I generally love AI.
But I lament these blurred lines of reality. Is this photo real? Was this reply ChatGPT or did they actually write it?
It makes me feel uneasy.
I feel the same way. Thankfully there are still obvious signs in case of using LLMs, but it is not always so obvious. I think we may be better off assuming X is fake, and go from there. Sad but what could we do? There are websites that tell you (with a %) whether or not something has been written by an LLM. Unfortunately, however, some of my writings come out false positive. We may need to do improvements on this front, and I believe we will.
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This is wild to me. I take plenty of smartphone photos and have literally never in my life wanted to distort a picture in this way. None of my pictures are ever getting published or being used to promote a product; being a visual record of a past event is exactly what I want out of them. I'm honestly pretty surprised to hear this is turning into such a minority view.
No wonder why Google says:
“Generate, transform and edit images with simple text prompts, or combine multiple images to create something new. All in Gemini.“
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026719
Yes, this is the exact same reason that frame smoothing exists. When you walk into a store, all the TVs are lined up showing some random nature show or sports event, and frame smoothing will make your TV look a little more smooth than the others, even though it completely ruins the content.
It's made for making sales, not for making things actually look good.
It doesn't "ruin the content", it's a psychological issue which would be fixed by more high quality productions actually producing high frame-rate content, so the association reverses.
It seems insane to actively make all content worse, having movies worsened down to a lower frame-rate just because we have a hangover from decades old technology.
It's a shame that Peter Jackson's Hobbit wasn't a great movie. Had it been, then maybe it could have been a better driver of high frame-rate movies.
Your premise to lower (temporal) detail his automatically worse is a naïve view. I’m certain you’re aware that impressionism is a valid, quite successful form of art. Do you think there are any critics who say a Monet painting would be far better if it, just had more detail? Oh if only Van Gough used a smaller brush his paintings would have been so much better! It needs “more k!”.
Film making at 24fps (while originally selected for pragmatic reasons having to do with film cost and sound fidelity) turned out to be a happy accident. It produces an Impressionistic Effect entirely similar to a money painting. 24fps is absolutely not reality. Our brains know it too. The same way they know that those giant brush strokes in a Van Gough painting are also NOT REALITY. Turns out our brains like to be toyed with. Art is just always “trying to document precisely what our senses would have experienced if we were there”.
That is just a false premise and one they misunderstands art in general.
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I loved the first Hobbit movie, which was the only one that was mostly based on the book. It was the first and unfortunately also the only theater experience that I've ever had, that didn't make me feel frustrated that I couldn't make out anything that was happening in the fast sequences.
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Lower framerate isn't worse, it's just different.
But the artifacts introduced by TV frame interpolation absolutely can ruin the content completely.
I disagree with this. Even if the film is shot in HFR I don't like how it looks.
It's just SOE, soap opera effect, and it has nothing to do with any artifacts from motion smoothing, because the look is the same even if it's filmed in HFR. The only things I like in HFR are sports or maybe home videos. Any sort of movie or TV show where I want the suspension of disbelief, I am still much preferring 24fps.
Of course this is just my opinion, but home theater is a big hobby of mine and so I spend a fairly great deal of time looking at different content and analyzing it and thinking about it and how I feel about it or enjoy it.
Not attempting to take anything away from those who do like HFR, but just saying that it's not for everyone.
At some point it became unacceptably rude to gatekeep, king-make, or be otherwise judgemental of taste. It was at around the same time that subcultures and counterculture melted into an homogenous mass.
I think we lost something in that. Embarrassment can be useful for moving us out of our comfort zones.
It is weird.
One funny thing I've noticed is that software developers (including myself) seem to rebel against it the most. A surprising number of software developers I know shoot film. No digital cameras, they just take photos, get the prints, and they're done.
It seems to be the non-technical people who are most OK with the inauthenticity that comes with AI "enhanced" photos.
Couldn't you pretty reasonably create Bokeh algorithmically, since it's destroying information rather than creating it?
May I ask how religious (or woowoo) your partner is?
The number of people who care about having an objectively true understanding of as much of reality as possible is disappointingly small and I suspect that these photo trends are just making that fact more obvious.