Comment by gyomu
8 months ago
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.
The difference is that the AI results are accepted as real photos restored, not the caricatures that they are.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/842315653616542/posts/149825...
Random example I just found in a group called "Photo Restoration Facebook Group"
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.
They’re not mutually exclusive though. My wife has our portraits taken about twice a year and sometimes during a vacation or major event. So we have those, we also have tons unedited candid photos we take on a daily basis and never share (or only on a closed platform like a shared Album in iOS Photos), then my wife does a lot of editing and montage stuff for some of the stuff she posts more broadly to SM. I post nothing to SM so can’t speak from personal experiences here, but what I’m saying is there isn’t a single use case anymore. We have the tools at our disposal to just scratch curious itches even when they don’t get posted or shared (which I’d bet is a majority of photos). You’re viewing it as reductive but it’s expansive from what I’ve seen.
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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.
Yes, I agree, but I am specifically looking to understand the above photographer's point. They said the requests they used to get versus what they get today have changed, but I argue that that doesn't make any sense, people have always wanted to edit their photos in the "now" example even back then.
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In other words: this is a complaint about how cheap modified pictures, that look real at first glance, are.
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
I'm specifically responding to their point about how "these days" people want different things and I'm saying that they always wanted those things, nothing new about it.
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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.
reality can be faked even without use of LLMs.
Take for instance instagram, youtube shorts and tiktok. I see people watching tons of small either supposedly funny or shocking videos. And people seem to believe they are totally real and not organize/produced content until I challenge them on a number of trivial details that make those videos totally unbelievable they would have been recorded by chance or in an opportunistic manner.
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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