Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It totally makes sense that people don't request things they don't expect to be possible.

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.

On the contrary, there is plenty new about it. People’s perception of how much you can change influences how much they ask. Seeing new possibilities gives you new ideas.

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.

In other words: this is a complaint about how cheap modified pictures, that look real at first glance, are.

"I'm delighted by this picture of some weird cartoon people that are in the same pose as my grandparents" puzzles me deeply, also.

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.

My point is that their "these days" example was already possible 20 to 30 years ago, so if they're just seeing these requests today then they're missing out on what people have wanted even back then.

That attitude actually feels a couple of years out of date to me, now the response is often along the lines of, "So what, everything is staged, it's just for fun, get over it and stop being a killjoy".

There's a general belief that nothing is real, but we should still just act, and be influenced by it, as if it were real.

I disagree. My parents generation took photos on point and shoot cameras. They waited a week or longer to get them developed, never really knowing what they took.

These photos ended up stuck to pages in an album to be brought out occasionally, or they were really good, in a frame placed on display. They have pictures from the 80s still out on their mantle.

Maybe once a decade they would go to a studio like at Sears and get a pro to get the whole family together. These would be edited, but also very rare.

Even the thought that they would be taking pictures for anyone else to ever see would rarely cross their minds, let alone the need to make major edits. Regular people simply didn’t have this vanity or need for approval when taking pics like the smartphone era

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.

Ironically one of our framed photo is my partner and me posing next to an historic building in a pueblo magico in Mexico. A stray dog decided to piss on the wall when my sister in law was taking the picture. She actually realised it and took a second picture but it turned out we like the first one better as it is just much more authentic.

> They’re not mutually exclusive though.

I get what you're saying, but I don't think I entirely agree. If we live in a world where you can't tell if a picture is real or fiction, then it becomes necessary and reasonable to think of all pictures as fiction.

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.

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.

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

This is only an issue with a single photo or low sample sizes. In the case of family photos, you’d like have a whole bunch of them to reference and could spot inconsistencies more easily. If it becomes so good to be completely indistinguishable from reality, then not sure what the gripe is. You could just as easily think of all pictures as unaltered. It’s a matter of optimism/pessimism or perhaps red pill/blue pill.

Granted, if your grandparents are showing you their vacation pictures from their world travels that never happened, this is a different scenario that is weird and can could happen. It’s a balance of trusting nothing you see while making a few exceptions for your family and whatnot

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.

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

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.

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"

> If it becomes so good to be completely indistinguishable from reality, then not sure what the gripe is.

Being 100% convincing doesn't make it true. Not being able to tell what's true from what's fake is a self-evident problem. It means you're at risk of forming an invalid view of the world. The only safe approach would be to never believe anything, at which point we've even lost recent history. Madness lies that way.

My parents' generation also took photos but if something was off, they'd ask our photographer relative to edit them. This was over 20 years ago. At least some part of the population did know what photo editing was and did it, either themselves or with the help of someone else.